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COLLECTED ESSAYS 
OF 

EDMUND GOSSE 



VOL. I 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY STUDIES 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Uniform with this Volume 

GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY 
FRENCH PROFILES 
CRITICAL KIT-KATS 
PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



SEVENTEENTH 

% 

CENTURY STUDIES 



BY 

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1914 






J-&^7z 



%7Z 



Printed in England 



y 



PREFACE 

TO THE FIRST EDITION 

(1883) 

IN writing this book my object has been to do 
for some of the rank and file of seventeenth 
century literature what modern criticism has done, 
on a much larger scale, for Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Dryden. Those great figures have been taken out 
of their surroundings, and have been discussed upon 
their own merits, biographically, aesthetically, histori- 
cally. But in scarcely any instances, and in these on 
no consistent plan, has this been done for the smaller 
writers. Yet it is in these less monumental figures 
that the progress of literary history is most clearly to 
be marked, and it has seemed to me not undesirable 
that the truth which we try to tell definitely and 
exhaustively in a set of volumes about Milton or 
Dryden, should be told as definitely in a single 
chapter about Cowley or Otway. I have therefore 
tried to make each of the ensuing studies an exhaus- 
tive critical biography in miniature, yet each in some 

V 

h 



vl Preface to the First Edition 

way connected with that which precedes it, and all 
treated on the same relative scale. It was necessary, 
in order to do this, to take more pains than is at first 
sight apparent in the choice of names, some which 
presented themselves seeming to be too full of in- 
dividuality, and very many more to be not full 
enough. 

The volume was begun in 1872, and, with neces- 
sary intervals, has occupied me ever since. The first 
list of contents upon which I decided, ran thus : — 
Lodge, Webster, Dekker, Donne, Randolph, Herrick, 
Cowley, Orinda, Etheredge, Otway. In the second 
half of this list it has not seemed necessary to make 
any modification ; in the first half three names occur 
which will not be found represented in this book. 
Perhaps I may be allowed to mention the reason of 
this alteration, as it helps me to explain the scope of 
my inquiry. Whether Dekker or a somewhat earlier 
name would best fit my purpose was still undecided 
when the Council of the Hunterian Club asked me to 
introduce to their subscribers their magnificent reprint 
of Samuel Rowlands. I was obHged, for this purpose, 
again to read through the entire works of that author, 
and I then saw that he was even a more typical figure 
than Dekker, his immediate successor. 

It was with reluctance that I resigned Donne and 
Randolph, and from opposite reasons. It seemed that 



Preface to the First Edition vii 

the one was too small and the other too large for 
the species of portraiture which I had chosen. Upon 
reflection I decided that, in spite of his promise and 
his virile grace, the author of The Jealous Lovers was 
too vague a figure to be painted at full length in a 
gallery of portraits. In the study on the Cotswold 
Games he is introduced, not too inadequately, I hope, 
in the centre of the manly school of Ben Jonson. 
Again, as I read more and more deeply in the litera- 
ture of the seventeenth century, I became convinced 
that I could not adequately deal with Donne within 
such narrow limits. That extraordinary writer casts 
his shadow over the vault of the century from its 
beginning to its close, like one of those ancient 
Carthaginian statues, the hands and feet of which 
supported opposite extremities of the arch they occu- 
pied. Donne is himself the paradox of which he 
sings ; he is a seeming absurdity in literature. To 
be so great and yet so mean, to have phrases like 
Shakespeare and tricks like Gongora, to combine 
within one brain all the virtues and all the vices of 
the imaginative intellect, this has been given to only 
one man, and that the inscrutable Dean of St. PauFs. 
To write fully of his work would be to write the 
history of the decline of English poetry, to account 
for the Augustan renascence, to trace the history of 
the national mind for a period of at least a century. 



viii Preface to the First Edition 

I felt Donne to be as far beyond the scope of my work 
as Ben Jonson would have been. 

All critical work, nowadays, must be done on the 
principle of the coral insect. No one can hope to 
do more than place his atom on the mass that those 
who preceded him have constructed. It will not be 
supposed that I am so presumptuous or so ignorant 
as to forget what has been written for seventy years 
past on the poetry of the seventeenth century, or 
how much genius, industry, and judgment have been 
expended on its elucidation. It must, however, be 
remembered that this minute care has usually been 
reserved for greater men than those with whom 
I have to deal. When I began this volume only 
three of the poets discussed in it had been edited, 
only one in the exact modern method. When the 
ensuing study on Herrick first appeared in 1874, 
Mr. Palgrave had not produced his Chrysomelay Dr. 
Grosart had not collected and edited the works, 
Mr. Edwin Abbey had not reprinted and adorned 
the Hesperides with illustrations that form a brilliant 
and sympathetic commentary. Since my successive 
studies have been written, Lodge, Rowlands, Dover, 
and Cowley have for the first time been edited, 
in each case, however, for private subscribers alone. 
Crashaw now exists in two stately quartos, edited by 
Dr. Grosart ; but Orinda, Etheredge, and Otway are 



Preface to the First Edition ix 

still attainable only in the original editions. As long 
as the books themselves are so difficult of access, 
so long will hasty criticism continue to repeat the 
acute, but often entirely false and unfounded gene- 
ralisations of writers like Hallam, who enlightened 
our darkness before literary analysis had become a 
science. 

As far as actual historical discovery goes, it is hard 
for any one nowadays to glean after Dr. Grosart. How- 
ever, I may claim in some of the studies, in those on 
Lodge, Rowlands, and Etheredge in particular, to have 
added some essential facts to our previous knowledge. 
This, however, has not been my principal aim. I have 
rather desired to enrich the biography of each poet 
by a careful analysis of the evidence concealed in his 
work, and in the writings of his coevals, a field which, 
particularly as we descend the century, has been sin- 
gularly little worked. I hope, moreover, that in the 
critical part of the work it may be found that I have 
not unsuccessfully introduced certain elements, the 
influence of contemporary politics, the relation to 
foreign literatures, the relative aspect of divergent 
schools, which have been hitherto neglected. 

By first printing each study in a provisional form, 
I may have laid myself open to the charge of seeming 
to disguise the unity of my work. I cannot, however, 
regret a practice which gave me the great advantage 



X Preface to the First Edition 

of getting my work revised by the most competent 
hands. It is impossible to ask friends to weary them- 
selves with the examination of manuscript, but the 
busiest scholar will revise a friend's work in print. 
I have submitted these essays, in their earlier form, 
to several persons who have made a special study 
of English poetry, and their strictures and corrections 
have been of inestimable service to me in my final 
revision. To all these friends my best thanks are due, 
but, particularly to Mr. Leslie Stephen, who was in 
most cases the first reader of these studies, and but for 
whose indulgence — that of the kindest of editors — they 
could scarcely have seen the light ; to Mr. Swinburne, 
for whose censure and encouragement, particularly in 
the early part of the design, I cannot be too grateful ; 
to Dr. Grosart, for gifts of books and correction of 
various matters of detail; and lastly, to Mr. J. Henry 
Shorthouse, for sympathetic notes on Crashaw and on 
Orinda. 



A 



CONTENTS 






Page 


Thomas Lodge 


• 


. . r 


John Webster . 


• 


• 47 


Samuel Rowlands 


• • 


.81 


Captain Dover s Cotszvold Games 


• 103 


Robert Herrick . 




• 125 


Richard Crashaw ^\ 




. 157 


Abraham Cowley . 




. . . i^i 


The Matchless Orinda . 




. 229 


*S*/V George Etheredge . 




. 259 


Thomas Otway . 




. 299 


Appendix . 




' • • 343 


Index 




. • • 345 



THOMAS LODGE 

IF a full and continuous biography of Thomas Lodge 
could be recovered, it would possess as much in- 
terest to a student of Elizabethan manners and 
letters as any Memoir that can be imagined. It would 
combine, in a series of pictures, scenes from all the prin- 
cipal conditions of life in that stirring and vigorous 
age. It would introduce us to the stately civic life of 
London city, to Oxford in the early glow of humanism 
and liberal thought, to the dawn of professional literature 
in London, to the life of a soldier against Spain, to the 
adventures of a freebooting sailor on the high seas, to the 
poetry of the age, and then to its science, to the stage 
in London and to the anatomical lecture-room in 
Avignon, to the humdrum existence of a country 
practitioner, and to the perilous intrigues of a sym- 
pathiser with CathoHcism trembling on the verge of 
treason. 

Lodge is therefore in many respects a typical figure. 
His genius, from the purely literary point of view, is 
sufficiently considerable to make him interesting in 
himself, and to give him a noticeable presence in the 
shifting pageant of the times. But what mainly dis- 
tinguishes him from four or five other composers of 



2 Seventeenth Century Studies 

delicate lyrics and amorous romances is the length and 
picturesque variety of his career. Of this career, 
unhappily, we possess but the outline. A few dates in 
wills or at the close of prefaces, a few nimble conjec- 
tures, a page of biography in the AthencB of Anthony 
a Wood, these we have to piece together as best 
we may, and to endeavour to recover from them the 
lost presence of a man ; nor are we without this con- 
solation, that, for an Elizabethan poet, Lodge stands 
out before us at last with some measure of distinct- 
ness. 

The year of the birth of Thomas Lodge is a matter 
of pure conjecture. At the death of his mother in 
1579 he was not yet twenty-five, and at the death of 
his father in 1583 he had almost certainly passed that 
age. The various circumstances of his early career 
combine to make it probable that he was born in 1557. 
He was the second son of people in affluent circum- 
stances, his father. Sir Thomas Lodge, a grocer, having 
been Lord Mayor of London in the plague-year, 1563. 
The poet in after years took care to sign himself 
'^Gentleman," and to hold himself a Httle above the 
crowd of playwrights. His family pedigree was, or 
professed to be, an ancient one, and he claimed descent 
from Odoard di Logis, Baron of Wigton in Cumber- 
land, a nobleman of the twelfth century. The poet^s 
mother, Anne, Lady Lodge, was the daughter of a 
previous Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Laxton, 
who died before the poet's birth, in 1556; his grand- 
mother. Lady Laxton, who lived to see him grown 
up, seems to have shown him a particular partiality, 



Thomas Lodge 



and to have selected him for preference among her 
daughter's children, who were six in number. In 
1 57 1 he entered Merchant Taylors' School, as has 
lately been discovered.^ According to Wood, Thomas 
Lodge made his first appearance in Oxford about 1573, 
''and was afterwards servitour or scholar under the 
learned and virtuous Mr. Edward Hobye of Trinity 
College, where, making early advances, his ingenuity 
began at first to be observed by several of his compo- 
sitions in poetry." ^ This Edward Hobye was perhaps 
the son of that accomplished Sir Thomas Hobye, who, 
a quarter of a century earlier, had Englished the 
Courtier of Count Baldassar Castiglione. 

About 1575 there were three distinct schools or 
haunts of polite letters in England, each of them silent 
to the world, but each preparing to make itself widely 
felt, and each fitting out soldiers for the great conflict 
of the wits. At the court of Ehzabeth, Sidney, Greville, 
and Dyer were turning over the masterpieces of Greek 
and Italian literature, and dreaming, at least, of some 
form of stately English emulation. At Cambridge, 
amid a breathless circle of private admirers, Spenser 

^ To the courtesy of the Rev. Charles J. Robinson I owe the com- 
munication of this entry, from the Minutes of the Court of the Merchant 
Taylors' Company, held 23rd March I57t : — 

*' Item the foresaide M'^ and Wardens have admitted Thomas Lodge, 

fir, Thome L. militis, Edmond Greenock, fil G , Thomas 

Morgan, fil M , William Widnell, fil, William W., mercator 

scissor, Robert Smythe, fil, Robert S. Jarrett Keyne, fil, John K., 
fishmonger, Samuel Lane, fil, John L., vintner, are admitted of the 
number of those 1. schollars that are limited to be taughte within o' 
schole." 

The reference is to fifty scholars who were to pay 2s. 6d. a quarter. 



\ 



4 Seventeenth Century Studies 

was testing his powers of versification, as yet with 
little notion of the direction they would ultimately take. 
At Oxford, when Lodge went up to Trinity, John Lyly 
had already been four years at Magdalen, and though 
still only twenty years of age, had attracted consider- 
able notice by his neglect of purely academical studies, 
and by his proclivities to poetry and romance. Among 
the youths who were clustered around him were 
George Peele, afterwards a famous playwright, and 
Abraham Fraunce, a writer of more reputation than 
merit. Probably in the same year which saw Lodge's 
advent at the University, Thomas Watson came to 
Oxford, and joined the coterie. 

It would be very interesting to follow the intellectual 
development of this set of Oxford students, who seem, 
in some obscure way, to have found at Cambridge an 
ardent friend and adherent in Robert Greene. Their 
early exercises in verse and prose have all been lost, 
unless, indeed, as seems not unlikely, some portion of 
Lyly's epoch-making Euphues was composed before its 
author took his degree in 1575. Lodge was beyond 
question deeply influenced by Lyly. To the close of 
his career his style continued to be coloured with 
Euphuism, and on two separate occasions he blazoned 
the name of Lyly's masterpiece on a title-page of his 
own. To his intimacy with Peele he owed, in all 
probability, his interest in the stage, and his zeal for 
the revival of dramatic art; and Watson, whom he 
was destined to surpass in every branch of poetry, may 
have led him first in a lyrical direction with his amorous 
and precocious Hekatompathia, His own writings 



Thomas Lodge 5 

show that he was deeply read in the classics, that he 
had mastered French, Spanish, and Italian, and that 
he was familiar with all the learned subtilties which 
at that time engaged the leisure of the Universities. 

All that we positively know of Lodge's Oxford 
career is that he was at college with Edmund and 
Robert Carew, sons of Lord Hunsdon, and that he 
remained at Trinity until he took his degree of Bachelor 
of Arts, on the 8th of July 1577, being then probably 
twenty years of age. He did not remain at Oxford to 
take the higher degree of Master of Arts ; but return- 
ing to London, was admitted, on the 26th of April 
1578, into the Society of Lincoln's Inn. His elder 
brother, William Lodge, had belonged to the Society, 
in which his father also had held office since 1572. 
In the winter of 1579 he, had the misfortune to lose 
his mother, Lady Lodge ; in the course of that year 
she had drawn out her will, in which she makes 
particular mention of her son Thomas, bequeathing 
part of her property towards '^his finding at his book 
at Lincoln's Inn," and the rest to him at the age of 
twenty-five, with this provision, that should he ''dis- 
continue his studies," and cease to be what "a good 
student ought to be," this property should, on his 
father's decision, be divided among his brothers. It 
is unsafe to argue from this caution that Lodge was 
already a youth of unsteady character; on the contrary, 
he must have shown particular powers of intelligence 
to be thus selected among six children as his mother's 
sole legatee. There was probably some understanding 
on this point entered into between the father and 



( 



6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

mother, for in Sir Thomas Lodge's will the five other 
children are provided for, but the poet is not mentioned. 
It was perhaps recognised that Thomas had already- 
received his share of the family estate direct from 
his mother. 

The death of his mother seems to have been the 
occasion of his first essay in publication. An Epitaph 
of the Lady Anne Lodge was licensed on the 23rd of 
December 1579, and the name of its author was 
entered as ^'T. Lodge." This poem, which was pro- 
bably an unbound pamphlet, has totally disappeared. 
Lodge's next venture has shown more vitality, but 
caused him at the time great disappointment and 
vexation. In 1579 the Rev. Stephen Gosson, a young 
divine of more effrontery than talent, published a 
furious counterblast against poetry, music, and the 
drama. This volume, which was named The School of 
Abuse ^ was in fact a puritanical attempt to nip in the 
bud the whole new blossom of English literature. It 
was not inspired, as were the attacks of Jeremy Collier 
a century later, by the righteous anger of a not very 
imaginative man who saw the wickedness of the stage 
without noticing its poetry; it was merely the snarl 
of a dull cleric who hated all that was urbane and 
graceful for its own sake. What was perhaps the 
strangest thing about it was that it abused poetry, 
and music, and stage-plays before these things had 
really begun to exist in England, so that its author 
was forced, in the absence of actual foes, to fight with 
such phantoms of literature as Webbe and Puttenham. 
The School of Abuse had hardly been published when 



Thomas Lodge 



the Shepherd s Calendar appeared, and demonstrated 
its absurdity. Young Thomas Lodge had the want 
of wisdom to fly in defence of the fine art against this 
lumbering opponent, and to pit his Oxford rhetoric 
against the apparatus of a professed pedant. A much 
greater honour, and a much more complete disaster, 
awaited Gosson in the fact that Sir PhiHp Sidney was 
about to deign to answer his attack on the arts in his 
final Apology for Poetry, This latter work, not printed 
till 1595, was written in the autumn of 158 1. It was 
probably about a year earlier that Lodge wrote and 
hurried through the press his reply to Gosson. Of 
this reply only two copies have come down to us, 
each in a mutilated condition, without title-page or 
introduction. There seems to have been a refusal of 
publication, for Lodge himself says, in his preface to 
the Alarum against Usurers^ in 1584: — 

"About three years ago, one Stephen Gosson published a 
book, intitled The School of Abuse,, in which, having escaped 
in many and sundry conclusions, I, as the occasion then fitted 
me, shaped him such an answer as beseemed his discourse, 
which by reason of the slenderness of the subject, because it 
was in defence of plays and playmakers, the godly and reverend, 
that had to deal in the cause, misliking it, forbade the publishing, 
notwithstanding he, coming by a private imperfect copy, about 
two years since, made a reply." 

Lodge's Defence of Poetry need not detain us long. 
It is a production of the old inflated type, without a 
touch of modern freshness, full of pompous and only 
too probably spurious allusions to the classics, vague, 
wordy, and, in its temper, offensive. The author's 



8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

opponent is '^shameless Gosson/^ a ''hypocrite," a 
''monstrous chicken without head/' and is addressed 
throughout with unmeasured and voluble contempt. 
The whole tract consists, as we possess it, of only 
twenty-four leaves, and within this small compass all 
the arts are defended from their clerical assailant. It 
is illustrative of the poverty of native literature in 
1 579; that not a single poem or play in the English 
language is quoted or referred to. That the little 
tract should have been suppressed is unaccountable, 
yet not more so than such an act of purposeless 
tyranny as the extinction of Drayton's Harmony of 
the Church ten years later. We know too little of 
the circumstances attending the censorship of the 
press under Elizabeth to hazard a conjecture regarding 
its mode of operation. 

During the next few years we have great difficulty 
in following Lodge's fortunes. According to our sup- 
position that he was born in 1557, he must have 
inherited his mother's fortune in 1582, since it was to 
pass to him when he reached the age of twenty-five. 
It is possible that before this he had become alienated 
from his family, and had even suffered poverty. In 
1 581 Lodge revised for the press, and issued with 
a commendatory poem of his own, Barnaby Rich's 
romance of Don Siinonides, In this poem he speaks 
of his muse as dulled by his "long distress," and 
remarks that " a doleful dump pulls back my pleasant 
vein." I confess that these phrases seem to me to 
suggest illness rather than material ill-fortune, and I 
think that this view is justified by the famous phrase 



Thomas Lodge 



of Stephen Gosson, who, returning to the attack in 
1582, spoke of Lodge as ^^ hunted by the heavy hand 
of God, and become Httle better than a vagrant, looser 
than liberty, lighter than vanity itself/' Here, I think, 
we may perceive a mixture of fact and supposition. 
Gosson had doubtless heard of that '^ distress " under 
which Lodge was labouring, and at once proceeded, in 
the cowardly manner of disputants in that age, to 
exaggerate it to Lodgers confusion. Gosson knew so 
little about his opponent that he calls him William, 
some copies of Plays Confuted containing a slip, on 
which is the word '^ Thomas," pasted over the 
'' William." Gosson^s testimony is of little value, and 
if we listen to his vague accusation, we are no less 
bound to remember that, when Lodge found next 
occasion to take up his pen, he refuted the charges of 
Gosson in a manly and straightforward epistle to those 
who knew him best, the Gentlemen of the Inns of 
Court : — 

" You that know me, Gentlemen, can testify that neither my 
life hath been so lewd, as that my company was odious, nor my 
behaviour so light, as that it should pass the limits of modesty : 
this notwithstanding, a licentious Hipponax, neither regard- 
ing the asperity of the laws touching slanderous libellers, nor 
the offspring from whence I came, which is not contemptible, 
attempted, not only in public and reproachful terms to condemn 
me in his writings, but also to slander me." 

Lodge was not so vagrant a person but that he had 
married by this time, and in 1583 possessed property, 
which he devised in his will to his wife Joan, and to his 
daughter Mary. In December of the same year, his 



lo Seventeenth Century Studies 

father, Sir Thomas Lodge, died and was buried at St. 
Mary, Aldermary, with civic honours. 

With this event the early career of the poet closes, 
and it is at this point that we must refer once more to 
the Alarum against Usurers, in which a number of 
passages occur which have been supposed, and not 
without a show of probability, to be autobiographical. 
In that work, published in 1584, Lodge comes before 
us as a writer possessing much more command over 
language than he had displayed in his attack on 
Gosson. The Alarum is a prose treatise against 
'^ coney-catching," the first of a class in which Greene, 
and afterwards Dekker, were to attain a great popu- 
larity, in which the temptations and miseries of 
London life were painted in gloomy colours, and the 
results of dissolute living were traded on to produce a 
literary effect. In Lodge's case it has been taken for 
granted that the palinode was sincere and personal, 
and that in this pamphlet he wore the white sheet 
publicly for notorious offences of his own. Nothing is 
more rash than a supposition of this sort, and nothing 
more dangerous in biographical criticism than to 
identify the literature with the man. Lodge describes 
a young gentleman from the University, whose mother 
tenderly cherished him, and whose wit was praised 
and his preferment secured, until his father brought 
him to the Inns of Court, where he fell among evil 
companions, and sank into giddy and debauched habits. 
His mother is now dead, his father^s allowance to him 
is insufficient to meet his expenses, and he is deeply 
involved with usurers. 



Thomas Lodge ii 

There is no doubt a great temptation to the bio- 
grapher to distribute the incidents of this picturesque 
study along the scanty lines of Lodge's own memoir, 
but a more careful perusal of the Alarum shows the 
extreme danger of this course. The tract is inspired, 
probably, by some experience of the evils of which 
it treats ; but it is not possible that, if the poet had 
been notoriously an evil-liver of this boisterous kind, 
he would have chosen to analyse his experience 
in so full and open a manner, in a book which bore 
his name, and which was elaborately dedicated to his 
colleagues of Lincoln's Inn. It is much more likely 
that his experience as a lawyer opened up to him the 
abuses which he describes, and that the real object 
of his tract was a purely philanthropic one, a desire 
to bring the scandalous tyranny of the money-lenders 
before the notice of Parliament. 

Bound up with the Alarum against Usurers^ in 
1584, were two other works of a widely different 
nature. The Delectable History of Forbonius and 
Prisceria is a romance in prose and verse, which 
shows that Lodge responded with instant promptitude 
to Greene's start-word in Mamillia the year before. 
In these florid and cumbrous stories the English novel 
put forth its first bud; it is in these imitations of 
Italian romance that our long series of fiction com- 
mences. One or two writers, and particularly Whet- 
stone in his Promos and Cassandra in 1578, had given 
a kind of timid suggestion of a story ; but it is Greene 
to whom the merit is due of first writing a book wholly 
devoted to fictitious adventure in prose. Lodge, on 



^} 



12 Seventeenth Century Studies 

his side, made an improvement on Greene by introduc- 
ing into Forbonius and Prisceria poetical interludes 
and a system of correspondence in sonnets, which 
were immediately adopted by Greene, and bequeathed 
by him to his imitators. 

Hitherto Lodge's achievements in verse had been 
slight and far from promising, but in this book he 
begins to express himself with that mellifluous smooth- 
ness which afterwards characterised his poems. The 
prose style of the romance is founded on that of 
Lyly's EuphueSj of which Lodge was then, and re- 
mained, by far the most successful adapter. His 
memory was no less well stocked, and his fancy no 
less graceful than those of Lyly himself, and he added 
to Lyly's rather cold ethical abstraction of style a 
southern glow of feeling. In Forbonius and Prisceria^ 
however, we see rather a suggestion of this latter 
quality than the presence of it, and the merits of the 
romance are negative rather than positive. The third 
division of the volume is the best; it is a vigorous 
satirical poem in rhyme royal entitled TrutKs Complaint 
over England. In accordance with prudence, no less 
than with the fashion of the age, the exact meaning of 
the satire is concealed under an allegorical narrative. 
Britain is expostulated with for her unjust madness, 
for her prejudice against truth, and for being " hard- 
hearted, flinty-minded, and bent to abuse." In the 
face of Lodge's later relations to the Catholic party, 
it is difficult to understand these reproaches otherwise 
than by supposing the satire to be a prudently con- 
cealed protest against the Anti-Romanist action of 



Thomas Lodge 13 

Parliament, and the new stringent laws against the 
Jesuits. To have openly attempted to stem the rapidly- 
increasing flood of prejudice against the Papacy would 
merely have been to endanger the poet^s own head, 
and we must suppose Truth's Complaint to have been 
one more of those cryptic contributions to politics 
which the Elizabethan poets loved to devise, and the 
only satisfaction of which must have been the pleasure 
of making an oral commentary to private friends. 

As far as I am aware, there is no reason to suppose 
that any earlier edition of Lodgers next work, Scillds 
Metamorphosis J than that which we now possess of 
1589, was ever published. Yet I confess I should be 
little surprised if it was found to belong rather to 1585 
or 1586. It seems to me to be a product of the poet's 
early London life, before the date of his wanderings, 
and the tone of the preface, no less than the style of 
the contents, bears out this supposition. It is dedi- 
cated, like the Alarum against Usurers^ to the Gentle- 
men of the Inns of Court, and the author styles himself 
^' of Lincoln's Inn, Gent." The preface, which is written 
in a cumbrous and affected style unworthy of Lodge 
in 1589, complains of the spread of poetic composition, 
which enforces him to publish his verses and assert 
his individuality. This petulance may either have 
been provoked by the success of such miscellanies as 
Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights^ or 
may be the expression of a passing irritation at the 
success of Lodge's personal friends, Lyly, Greene, 
Watson, and Peele, all of whom had come before the 
public with some prominence during the last few years. 



14 Seventeenth Century Studies 

The rapidity with which Greene, in particular, had 
poured forth his romances, might well have suggested 
to Lodge that *' our wits nowadays are waxed very fruit- 
ful, and our pamphleteers more than prodigal ; " and the 
ease and skill with which the same writer had adopted 
and enriched that manner in poetry which Lodge had 
invented, may have provoked the latter to irritation. 

Glaucus and Scilla^ as the poem of Scillds Meta- 
morphosis is more properly named, was, however, a 
work in which its author owed little to his prede- 
cessors, and had nothing to fear from his contem- 
poraries. It is no small merit in Lodge that in this 
\ work he was the inventor, or the introducer, into 
\ English literature, of a class of poem which has thriven 
amongst us, and which counts Shakespeare, Keats, and 
even Wordsworth (in Laodaniid) among its direct culti- 
vators. This was the minor epic in which a classical 
subject is treated in a romantic manner. Lodge sus- 
tains his theme through nearly one hundred and fifty 
stanzas, and if his narrative manner leaves much to 
be desired, his style is fluent and coloured, and his 
fancy is well supported. But the great interest of this 
poem, and one which has never fully received the 
attention it deserves, is the influence which it had 
upon the mind of Shakespeare. It is not too much 
to say that Venus and Adonis is a direct imitation of 
Glaucus and Scilla — an imitation, indeed, which vastly 
outshines its original, but none the less was distinctly 
composed in emulation of the older poem. The stanza 
in which the two poems are written is the same, and 
the relation between the volumes of 1589 and 1593 



Thomas Lodge 15 

becomes quite startling when we realise that these 
verses occur in the earlier poem : — 

" He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy 
Wiping the purple from his forced wound, 
His pretty tears betokening his annoy, 
His sighs, his cries, his falling on the ground, 
The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall, 
The trees with tears reporting of his thrall ; 

" And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry. 
Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on. 
And full of grief at last with piteous eye, 
Seen where all pale with death he lay alone. 

Whose beauty quailed, as wont the lilies droop. 
When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop. 

" Her dainty hand addressed to daw her dear, 
Her roseal lip allied to his pale cheek. 
Her sighs, and then her looks and heavy cheer. 
Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek ; 
How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, 
As if the boy were then but new a-dying." 

This is very close to the earliest manner of Shake- 
speare ; and, if we return from Glaucus and Scilla 
to Venus and Adonis ^ we shall be struck by the 
resemblance in many points. There can be no doubt 
that the young Shakespeare borrowed from Lodge his 
tone, the mincing sweetness of his versification, and 
the fantastical use of such words as ''lily," "purple," 
crystal," and ** primrose." None of the predecessors 
of the greatest of our poets had so direct an influence 
upon his early style as Lodge, and this must certainly 
be accounted not the least of the claims of the latter 
to our attention. 



1 6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

The remaining poems in the volum.e of 1589 are 
worthy of careful examination. A poem ^' In com- 
mendation of a SoHtary Life " is a very delicate and 
refined composition, and one which might be taken 
as a typical example of the poetry of reflection in 
the age of Elizabeth. ^^A Beauty^s Lullaby," on 
the other hand, is confessedly a work of the author's 
youth, and returns to the unwieldy versification and 
confused volubility of a preceding generation, in which 
rhetoric had taken the place of fancy. ^' Sundry sweet 
Sonnets," with which the collection closes, contain a 
variety of interesting lyrical experiments; the little 
madrigal, beginning '*A very Phoenix, in her radiant 
eyes,'* and the song of which this is a verse — 

" The birds upon the trees 

Do sing with pleasant voices, 
And chant in their degrees 

Their loves and lucky choices, 
When I, whilst they are singing, 
. With sighs mine arms am wringing," 

should be omitted from no anthology of Elizabethan 
verse ; the sonnets are most of them written in that 
spurious form of sixteen lines invented by Watson 
in his Hekatompathia^ but in a single instance Lodge 
gives us here a sonnet of fourteen lines. He founds 
it, evidently, upon French usage, for it is in alex- 
andrines. The proper Elizabethan sonnet had not 
yet been presented to the public, though Sidney's 
had doubtless been widely circulated in manuscript. 

The progress of poetical taste was so rapid in the 
ninth decade of the sixteenth century that we may 



Thomas Lodge 17 

trace it almost year by year. It seems to me im- 
possible that so very intelligent and sensitive a poet 
as Lodge xould have written these " Sundry sweet 
Sonnets" after Sidney's death in 1586. He might 
very well publish them later, indeed; and yet I feel 
much inclined to think that Scilla's Metamorphosis 
was but reprinted in 1589. Of its author's adventures 
and manner of life between 1584 and 1590 we know 
only this, that he was engaged in at least one free- 
booting expedition to Spanish waters. In the very 
interesting preface to Rosalynde he tells us that he 
accompanied Captain Clarke in an attack upon the 
Azores and the Canaries. His expressions are so 
eloquent, and breathe so exactly the grandiose spirit 
of the age of Elizabeth, that we may quote them with 
advantage. '' Having," he says to his friend Lord 
Hunsdon, *' with Capt. Clarke made a voyage to the 
Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, to beguile the 
time with labour, I writ this book, rough, as hatched in 
the storms of the ocean, and feathered in the surges 
of many perilous seas.'' No account of this particular 
expedition has been preserved, and we may believe 
that it did not materially differ from many others of 
which a record has been kept by Purchas or Hakluyt. 
The romance oi Rosalynde : Euphues' Golden Legacy, 
which appeared in 1590, is the next, and by far the most 
important of Lodge's longer productions. ''Room," 
says the author, " for a soldier and a sailor, that 
gives you the fruits of his labours that he wrought 
in the ocean, when every line was wet with a surge, 
and every humorous passion counterchecked with a 

B 



1 8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

storm/' It is very pleasant to imagine the young 
poet, in the same picturesque dress in which his 
fellow-soldiers fought the Spanish Armada, stretched 
on the deck of his ship while she sailed under a 
tropical sky, and setting the amorous passions of the 
Forest of Arden to the monotonous music of the ocean. 
But for us the great interest of this, the best of Lodgers 
works, consists in the fact that Shakespeare borrowed 
from it the plot of one of the most exquisite of his 
comedies. As You Like It. With the exceptions of 
Rosalynde herself, of Phoebe, and of Adam, the trusty 
servant, Shakespeare has altered all the names which 
Lodge gives to his persons. Sir John of Bordeaux 
(Sir Rowland de Bois) has two sons, Saladyne (Oliver) 
and Rosader (Orlando) ; the younger of these departs 
from his brother s house in dudgeon, and arrives at 
the court at Torrismond, king of France (Frederick), 
who has banished his brother Gerismond (the Duke), 
the rightful monarch, to be an outlaw in the forest of 
Arden. At the usurper's court Rosader meets the 
wrestler Norman (Charles), and challenges him to try 
a fall in the presence of Rosalynde and her friend 
Aliena (Celia), the false king's daughter. It will be 
remembered that Celia adopts the name Aliena in the 
forest. All then follows as in As You Like Ity except 
that there were in Lodge's story no equivalents to 
Jacques, Touchstone, arid Audrey. 

We put Lodge at a great disadvantage when we com- 
pare his crude invention with Shakespeare's magical 
insight and perfect vision ; it is more fair to compare 
the Rosalynde as a story with the tales of Lodge's 



Thomas Lodge 19 

immediate contemporaries. In it, and in the Menaphon 
of Greene, which was probably written about the same 
time, though published in 1589, we find the two coty- 
ledons between which sprang up the shoot which has 
spread into the mighty tree of English fiction. In 
these languid and cumbrous stories it may be difficult 
to trace any promise of the subtlety of Far froin the 
Madding Crowds or of the vivid realism of A Modern 
Instance^ but the process of evolution which has led 
from Greene and Lodge to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Howells 
has been consistent and direct. Already in these 
Euphuistic romances we trace in embryo certain 
qualities which have always been characteristic of 
Anglo-Saxon fiction, a vigorous ideal of conduct, a 
love of strength and adventure, an almost Quixotic 
reverence for womanhood. Before their time anything 
like a coherent tale in prose had been unknown in 
English ; chronicle-history had been attempted with 
occasional success, but purely imaginative invention 
had not. If we compare the Rosalynde of Lodge with 
the Menaphonj which is Greene's masterpiece, we are 
first struck with the strong similarity between the 
methods of the two friends. They had acted and 
reacted on each other, until it would be difficult, 
without much reflection, to be sure whether one rich 
dreamy page were the work of Greene or of Lodge. 
The verses would always help us to discriminate, and 
by-and-bye we should perceive that in the conduct of 
his story Lodge is more skilful and more business- 
like than Greene, who becomes entangled in his own 
garlands and arabesques. 



7/ 



20 Seventeenth Century Studies 

The Rosalynde is really very pleasant reading for 
its own sake, and as the author appears to have in- 
vented the plot, we may give him credit for having 
conceived a series of romantic situations which Shake- 
peare himself was content to accept. The life in the 
forest of Arden is charmingly described. Shakespeare 
gives us a sheepcot fenced about with olive-trees, 
but in Lodge the banished king is found feasting with 
the outlaws under a grove of lemons, and Rosader^ 
while he rests from hunting lions with a boar-spear, 
inscribes his sonnets on the soft bark of a fig-tree. 

These anachronisms cannot disturb those who enter 
into the spirit of either romance. The light which 
is blown down the deep glades of Arden, and falls 
lovingly on the groups in their pastoral masquerade, 
is that which never shone on sea or land, but which 
has coloured the romantic vision of dreamers since 
the world began. And it is very curious that the 
generation which saw the whole of Europe plunged 
into civil and international wars, when the roar of 
cannon became a common sound in the ears of Chris- 
tendom, and when the whole religious and social polity 
of man was undergoing noisy revolution, should be 
the one to turn with special fondness to the contem- 
plation of Arcadias and Eldorados, out of space, out 
of time; and that, on the very eve of the Armada^ 
Lodge should have sailed under the battlements of 
Terceira with his brain full of Rosader^s melancholy 
amoret in praise of beauteous Rosalynde^s perfection. 

The verse in the Rosalynde demands particular 
notice. It is as far superior to the prose in excellence 



Thomas Lodge 21 

as Lodge himself was to Gosson or Gabriel Harvey. 
Such a stanza as 

" With orient pearl, with ruby red, 
With marble white, with sapphire blue, 
Her body every way is fed, 
Yet soft in touch and sweet in view ; 
Nature herself her shape admires, 
The Gods are wounded in her sight, 
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires 
And at her eyes his brand doth light," 

and the pieces beginning ''First shall the heavens 
want starry light/' ''Love in my bosom like a bee/' 
and " Turn I my looks unto the skies/' are of the 
first order of excellence. Nothing so fluent, so opu- 
lent, so melodious had up to that time been known 
in English lyrical verse, for we must never forget that 
when these exquisite poems were given to the public, 
the Faery Queen itself was not yet circulated. In 
these love-songs a note of passion, a soaring and 
shouting music of the lark at heaven's gate, was heard 
for the first time above the scholastic voices of such 
artificial poets as Watson, and for a moment, to an 
observant eye. Lodge might have seemed, next after 
Spenser, the foremost living poet of the English race. 
Only, however, for a moment, since the vaster luminary 
of Shakespeare was on the horizon, attended and 
preceded by Hesper and Phosphor, Marlowe with the 
pride of his youth, and Sidney with his posthumous 
glory. And then the full morning broke, and Lodge 
in his sweet colours of the sunrise was set aside, and 
forgotten in a blaze of daylight. 



22 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Something of this must have been dimly felt by- 
Greene and Lodge. They did not confess that they 
were superseded, and from Lodge at least we have no 
word of petulance at the success of younger men. But 
from this date there is less effort made to breast the 
accomplishment of the age, and we find in both poets 
a recurrence to the established forms of their art. 
Greene, indeed, during the brief remainder of his life, 
abandoned the pastoral romance in favour of those 
treatises of ** coney-catching " of which Lodge had set 
him the example in his Alarum against Usurers. That 
the friendship between these eminent men had become 
close we have many evidences. Lodge, who must 
have been reading Ronsard or Baif, addressed an 
octett in French to Greene in 1589, as an introduction 
to the Spanish Masquerade of the latter poet, in which 
he addresses him as ''mon Greene" and "mon doux 
ami." The success of Rosalynde in 1590 was instan- 
taneous, and this romance continued to be printed for 
nearly a century. Lodge was encouraged to take up 
literature as a profession, and his publications during 
the next five years were very numerous. On the 
2nd of May 1591 he issued from **my chamber," pre- 
sumably in London, a piece of hackwork, the Life of 
Robin the Devilj a pseudo-historical account of the 
vices, adventures, and penitent end of Robert le Diable, 
second Duke of Normandy, whose brief career closed 
on the 2nd of July 1035, and whose eccentric vigour 
of character had collected a whole train of myths about 
his memory. This pamphlet was evidently a profes- 
sional piece of work, but it is very far from being one 



Thomas Lodge 23 

of Lodge's less successful pieces. The poems which 
he scattered through its pages display, it is true, much 
less originality and brilliance than those in Rosalynde^ 
but the story, such as it is, is well told, and there are 
prose passages, such as the voluptuous description of 
the ''Bower of Editha,'' which are equal to the best 
which Lodge has left us. It is perhaps not unworthy 
of remark that it is in this book that we first detect 
that sympathy with the Catholic creed, and with 
Roman forms of penitence and ritual, which became 
more and more marked in Lodge's writings, and which 
have led to the shrewd conjecture that he was already 
secretly a member of the Roman communion. 

At the close of Rosalynde Lodge promised that if 
the public encouraged his labours, he would next 
prepare his Sailor's Calendar, This work, which, if 
it ever appeared, has been hopelessly lost, was pro- 
bably an account of the author's expedition to the 
Azores with Captain Clarke, and would doubtless have 
been rich in such autobiographical touches as we can 
ill be content to miss. In October 1764 there was 
sold from the library of Mr. John Hutton, of St. Paul's 
Churchyard, a black-letter volume by Lodge, entitled, 
A Spider's Webj which has not turned up since. 
Several of his existing works remain in unique exem- 
plars, and there are, therefore, it is possible, other 
lacunae in our list of his productions. The next book 
which comes under our notice is one of the rarest of 
all, and its entire disappearance would denude its 
author of little of his glory. Before, however, we 
consider the CatharoSy which apparently was pubHshed 



24 Seventeenth Century Studies 

late in 1591, and during its author^s absence from 
England, we must deal with the circumstances which 
led him abroad. 

Thomas Cavendish was a young squire of Suffolk, 
who, upon attaining his majority, had fitted out a ship, 
and had gone with Sir Richard Grenville on a privateer- 
ing expedition to the West Indies. His courage was 
extraordinary, his judgment above that of a boy of 
twenty-one, and his power over men almost magical. 
In July of the following year he set out, at his own 
cost, on an enterprise which greatly impressed the 
imagination of the age, the circumnavigation of the 
globe, and this he accomplished in September 1588. 
He ravaged the coasts of many peaceful and savage 
nations, and returned to England with silken sails and 
every ostentation of wealth. So brilliant had been 
his success that he was encouraged, although his 
constitution had suffered in his adventures, to under- 
take a still more important piratical enterprise. On 
the 26th of August 1591, '^ three tall ships and two 
barks," with Thomas Cavendish at their head, set sail 
from Plymouth, bound for the coast of China and the 
Philippine Islands. Cavendish sailed on board the 
LeycesteVy and among the company of gentlemen who 
manned the second ship, the Desire^ a galleon of 140 
tons, in which Cavendish had made his previous 
voyage, was Thomas Lodge, the poet, who was now 
about thirty-four years of age. There may have been 
in him a hereditary love of this species of adventure, 
for his father, the sober Mayor of London city, had in 
the poet^s infancy taken part in a peculiarly infamous 



Thomas Lodge 25 

expedition of the kind, the voyage of Robert Baker to 
Guinea in 1562, with the Minion and the Primrose, 
It was in the course of this expedition, and of that 
which followed it in 1563, that the traffic in negro 
slaves was set in motion. 

It was necessary for Cavendish to avoid those par- 
ticular portions of the globe which he had ravaged 
in his voyage of circumnavigation, and we hear of 
his landing first on the coast of Brazil, which he 
had formerly avoided. He ordered an attack on the 
town of Santos, while the people were at mass; the 
surprise was accomplished, but no use was made of 
the success, and the failure of Cavendish's judgment 
was soon made apparent. From the 15 th of December 
to the 22nd of January 1592, the little fleet remained 
at Santos doing nothing ; the captain of the Roebuck, 
the third galleon, was told off in command of those 
who preferred to spend this time on shore, and Lodge 
was among the latter. The Englishmen took up their 
abode in the College of the Jesuits, and Lodge occu- 
pied himself, as he tells us, among the books in the 
Hbrary of the Fathers. He had by this time, per- 
haps on one of his previous expeditions, made himself 
master of the Spanish language. Something which 
he met with in a book at Santos suggested to him 
the idea which he proceeded to weave into a new 
romance. 

Meanwhile the English fleet were driven from their 
position by want of food, and proceeded down the 
coast of Brazil to the Straits of Magellan. '* Here," 
says Lodge, '' I had rather will to get my dinner, 



26 Seventeenth Century Studies 

than to win fame ; '^ and, indeed, a spirit of dissen- 
sion and mutiny began to render life on board the 
English ships almost unbearable. Cavendish, who 
could bear his men through unruffled success, but 
who was too young and too inexperienced for calm- 
ness in misfortune, seems to have lost his head alto- 
gether. The cold was extreme, the ships were 
separated by violent storms, and at last Cavendish 
left the Leycester and came on board the Desire^ where 
Lodge was, bitterly denouncing his own men, and 
refusing to sail with them any longer. The officers 
of the Desire held parley accordingly with those of 
the Leycester^ and Cavendish was persuaded to go 
back to the latter. Lodge seems to have shared the 
common dislike of Cavendish, for in 1596 he speaks 
of him as one ''whose memory, if I repent not, I 
lament not." 

In the midst, however, of these sufferings and dis- 
turbances, while they lay storm-bound among the icy 
cliffs of Patagonia, Lodge occupied himself by writing 
his Arcadian romance of the Margarite of America, 
which he printed four years later. In the preface 
to that book he says : '' Touching the place where 
I wrote this, it was in those Straits christened by 
Magellan ; in which place to the southward many 
wondrous Isles, many strange fishes, many monstrous 
Patagofies, withdrew my senses : briefly, many bitter 
and extreme frosts at midsummer continually clothe 
and clad the discomfortable mountains ; so that there 
was great wonder in the place wherein I writ this, 
so likewise might it be marvelled that in such scanty 



Thomas Lodge 27 

fare, such causes of fear, so mighty discouragements, 
and so many crosses, I should deserve to eternise 
anything." The weary months spent to no purpose 
within the Antarctic seas must have fretted the spirits 
of all the companions of Cavendish. At last it seems 
to have become plain to them that autumn was coming 
on, and that they would not get through to the Pacific 
at all. The Desire set off alone on her return voyage, 
and Lodge, if he was still on board of her, landed, 
after disappointment, suffering, and almost starvation, 
on the coast of Ireland, on the nth of June 1593. 
The crew of the ship had been reduced to sixteen, 
and of these only five were in tolerable health. Caven- 
dish himself died of a broken heart, at the age of 
twenty-nine, before he completed what Purchas calls 
'^ that dismal and fated voyage, in which he consum- 
mated his earthly peregrinations." 

This voyage appears to have cured Lodge of all his 
youthful vivacity, although his wandering spirit soon 
broke out again. During his absence of twenty-two 
months great changes had occurred. Three of those 
poets with whose names his had been most closely 
united had died during that interval; these were 
Watson, Greene, and Marlowe. But he found that 
his memory had been supported during his absence, 
in one case, certainly, by a friend whom he should 
never see again. In 1591, immediately after his 
departure, had been published his CatharoSy or, as the 
sub-title names it, A Nettle for Nice Noses. This has 
become one of the rarest, and must always have been 
one of the most insignificant of his productions. 



28 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Three friends, Diogenes, Philoplutos, and Cosmosophos, 
whose names betray their didactic purpose, carry on 
a dreary dialogue on the subject of the seven deadly 
sins as they are practised in Athens, or rather London. 
Diogenes is a cynic moralist, who claims that his own 
life is KaOapo^^ purCj and who bitterly reflects on the 
conduct of his fellow-citizens. The Nettle for Nice 
Noses has no literary merit ; it is an early example of 
the rabid and pedantic prose satire of the Ehzabethan 
age, a style of cheap literature which pandered to the 
respectable lower middle class, and fostered its pre- 
judices. Here and there we find a touch of Lodgers 
eloquent Euphuism, but as a whole this is among the 
tamest of his books. 

Infinitely better and more characteristic is the 
romance of Euphues' Shadow^ which appeared the 
following year, and the editing of which was one of 
the last performances on earth of Robert Greene. 
Lodge, as appears from the preface, wrote from 
America to Greene, begging him to see this book 
through the press and to select a patron. The title 
of the romance directly recalls the famous work of 
Lyly, and it is in Euphues' Shadow that Lodge comes 
nearest to his great precursor. Those far-fetched 
references to the classics, those applications to man^s 
estate of a fabulous zoology and botany, those involved 
and sonorous sentences, each a very microcosm in 
itself, all the features of Lyly^s extraordinary style are 
reproduced by Lodge with the most startling precision. 
We have the beast Varius, with his rich skin but rank 
flesh, the bird Struchio, the populous and pompous 



Thomas Lodge 29 

city of Pasan, the horn of the serpent Cerastes, the 
virtues of the herb Abrotamum, almost before we 
have fairly started in the story ; and the manner of 
Lyly is caught with singular art and precision. Pro- 
bably this was done on purpose, for it is certain that 
after a few pages the author becomes weary of this 
antithetical apparatus and panoply of examples, and 
sinks to the rich, easy style that was native to him. 
The lyrics, which are more sparsely than usual 
scattered over the pages of this romance, are not in 
Lodge's brightest vein, and no one of them would be 
selected as among his most characteristic pieces. 

It is probable that both of Lodge's surviving plays 
were first acted during his absence from England. We 
know that this was the case with A Looking Glass for 
London and England, in which Greene had been his 
collaborator. This drama was performed by Lord 
Strange's servants on the 8th and 27th of March 1592, 
and again on the 19th of April and the 7th of June of 
the same year. A passage of Greene's posthumous 
Groafs Worth of Wit has been rashly considered 
to refer unquestionably to Lodge. After exhorting 
Marlowe, Greene proceeds : ** With thee I join young 
Juvenal, that biting satirist, that lastly with me 
together writ a comedy." It is perhaps not much to 
the point that the Looking Glass is not a comedy at 
all, but a tragedy ; but it is almost certain that when 
Juvenal is mentioned Nash is always meant. Nash 
had made himself many enemies by his pasquils, and 
was widely known, which Lodge was not, as a *' biting 
satirist." It is possible that Nash may have assisted 



30 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Greene in writing his George a Greene^ or in composing 
some other comedy which no longer exists. At all 
events, our desire to clutch at every shred of bio- 
graphical allusion must not blind us to the fact that 
by Juvenal Greene can hardly have intended Lodge, 
or any one but Nash. 

In a tract printed in 1867, Dr. C. M. Ingleby care- 
fully sifted and collated all the evidence for the popular 
assumption that Lodge was himself a player, and he 
showed it to rest upon absolutely no basis at all. That 
somebody called Lodge failed to pay his tailor^s bill, 
and left Henslowe responsible for the debt, is one of 
those tantahsing little facts which may mean every- 
thing or nothing, and upon which it is exceedingly 
dangerous to dogmatise. Lodge had certainly very 
little dramatic faculty, and there is no evidence to 
show that at any period of his life he tried to eke out 
this talent by actual stage experience. Of his two 
plays, the Looking Glass for London and England is by 
far the more interesting. It is very primitive in form ; 
the serious part of the plot deals with the arrogance 
and license of Rasni, king of Assyria. Neither in 
manner nor in metrical peculiarity are these descrip- 
tions of the pride of Nineveh like anything else to be 
found in the works of Greene or Lodge. Whichever 
of them wrote the opening scenes of the Looking Glass 
was fresh from witnessing the performance of Marlowe^s 
Ta^nburlaine the Great^ and was anxious to outdo the 
young master himself in the ** swelling bombast of 
bragging blank verse.^^ It is probably Lodge to whom 
we owe the rant of these '* drumming decasyllabons," 



Thomas Lodge 31 

which occasionally soften to a richness that reminds 
us of the lyrics in Rosalynde, This is the language 
in which the King of Cicilia thinks fit to describe King 
Rasni :— 

" If lovely shape, feature by nature's skill 
Passing in beauty fair Endymion's, 
That Luna wrapped within her snowy breasts, 
Or that sweet boy that wrought bright Venus' bane, 
Transformed into a purple hyacinth, 
If beauty nonpareil in excellence 
May make a king match with the God in gree, 
Rasni is God on earth, and none but he." 

Unfortunately, although the authors of the Looking 
Glass borrowed from Marlowe something of his boister- 
ous music and his high key of passion, they possessed 
none of his sounder dramatic qualities. The piece is 
a strange old-fashioned farrago of bombast and satire ; 
when Rasni and the Ninevites are not mouthing, low 
comic personages in the streets of London are talking 
Elizabethan slang. A certain Osias serves as chorus, 
and shifts the clumsy scenes. Jonas is thrown straight 
out of the mouth of the whale on to the stage, and the 
vengeance of Heaven falls on Nineveh with a grotesque 
attempt at realism. Yet poor as is the Looking GlasSy 
it is a better play than Lodgers sole unassisted effort 
at dramatic composition, The Wounds of Civil War, 
first printed in 1594. The dull and tame scenes of 
this historical drama, in which there is hardly an 
attempt at action, and where there is even a melancholy 
absence of rant, hardly allow themselves to be read. 
At one point Lodge remembers who he is, and Marius, 



32 Seventeenth Century Studies 

in exile on the Numidian mountains, recites with great 
satisfaction a sonnet and a long madrigal, like those 
carved on the trees of Arden by Rosader and Montanus. 
It may be said that there is no female character in The 
Wounds of Civil War, for though Cornelia and Fulvia 
cross the stage, and then at the close recross it, they 
have no further business to perform. The play con- 
tains its sole historical interest in the fact that it was 
the precursor of those tragedies of Roman history 
which form so splendid a part of the works of Shake- 
speare and Ben Jonson. 

During 1593, the year of his return from South 
America, Lodgers pen was particularly active. It is 
probable that he resumed his legal connection, for, 
on the title-page of his Life and Death of William 
Longbeardy he once more styles himself '*of Lincoln^s 
Inn." This tract is a pseudo-historical romance of the 
same kind as Lodgers previous Robin the Devily but 
more hastily put together, and eked out with a variety 
of short stories about famous pirates, and the melan- 
choly fates of learned men. The tale which gives its 
name to the volume is adorned by a variety of odes 
and sonnets, which are pretty in themselves, but pre- 
posterously out of place in such a prosaic narrative of 
crime and its reward. Lodge was better occupied 
during the same year by contributing lyrics to the 
miscellany called The Phoenix Nest, which was printed 
by John Jackson, and nominally edited by a certain 
R. S. In the induction to his next publication, Phillis^ 
Lodge seems to claim for himself the responsibility 
of the Phoenix Nesty in which we find no fewer than 



Thomas Lodge 33 

thirteen of his pieces which occur nowhere else. 
Phillis itself, however, is a far more important publi- 
cation than either of these. It is, in fact, from a critical 
point of view, the best of all Lodgers works, Rosalynde 
excepted. Among the cycles of Elizabethan sonnets 
it takes an early place, being preceded by Sidney^s 
Stella^ Daniel's Delia^ and Constable's Diaiia^ and 
accompanied by Barnaby Barnes' Parthenope^ and 
Watson's posthumous Tears of Fancy. Lodge's son- 
nets are particularly rich in single lines, such as : — 

" The falling fountains from the mountains falling," 

and in short passages of extraordinary felicity, such 
as: — 

" The rumour runs that here in I sis swim 

Such stately swans, so confident in dying, 
That when they feel themselves near Lethe's brim 

They sing their fatal dirge when death is nighing ; 
And I, like these, that feel my wounds are mortal, 

Contented die for her whom I adore, 
And in my joyful hymns do still exhort all 

To die for such a saint, or love no more." 

But it is rare to find a sonnet which preserves this 
level of excellence throughout. That beginning 

" How languisheth the primrose of Love's garden," 

has found its way into the anthologies, and 

" I wrote in Myrrha's bark, and as I wrote," 

with its beautiful pine-wood scenery, is almost as 
worthy of popularity. The use of the double rhyme 
gives a unique sweetness to many of Lodge's sonnets, 



34 Seventeenth Century Studies 

and in almost all of them, even where the construction 
is most lax and the sense most obscure, the diction 

/is particularly rich. The volume contains, besides 
sonnets, some of Lodge's best songs and lyrics, in 
particular ^' Love guides the roses of thy lips," '^ My 
Phillis hath the morning sun," and '^ My matchless 
L.^- mistress, whose delicious eyes," each of which might 
be quoted as a type of the erotic poetry of the age. 
The whole book was dedicated to Lady Shrewsbury. 
It closes with a long, dreary, and excessively obscure 
elegiac poem called The Complaint of Elstred^ which 
may have given Shakespeare a faint suggestion of the 
form of his Lover's Complaint^ and which tells those 
histories of Locrine and Sabrina, which were drama- 
tised two years after with the assumption of Shake- 
speare's name, and in a subsequent generation occupied 
the attention of Milton. 

When Joseph Hall brought out his Virgidemiamm 
in 1597, and boasted with youthful braggadocio — 

"follow me who list 
And be the second English satirist," 

he forgot or neglected to remind his readers that Lodge 
had, in 159S, published in his Fig for Momus four or 
five satires which led the way for future essays in this 
vein so distinctly that to overlook them was an act of 
bad faith or of bad history. This was another case in 
which Lodge set a fashion which has been followed by 
every English writer of the same kind. The satire in 
heroic couplets has passed from Lodge through Hall, 
Donne, Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Crabbe, and Byron, 



Thomas Lodge 35 

to such rare later efforts as have been essayed, without 
any change of outward form, and Lodge deserves the 
credit of his discovery. His satires seem to have 
attracted no notice in his own age, for he was never 
encouraged to print that ** whole centon of them," 
which, he says, were in his possession. 

The Fig for Momus^ which was sent out to the 
world on the 6th of May 1595, was in several ways a 
tentative volume. Lodge proved himself an innovator 
again by publishing in it, for the first time in English, 
epistles in verse to private persons, founded in form 
upon those of Horace. Of these epistles several ad- 
dress eminent men in terms of friendship. One to 
Michael Drayton, to whom an eclogue in the same 
volume is inscribed under the pseudonym of Rowland, 
shows the existence of an intimate affection between 
Lodge and the young author of Idea^ and is an early 
testimony to the dignified esteem with which Drayton 
was regarded by his contemporaries. An eclogue in 
the Fig for Momus is dedicated to Samuel Daniel, an 
Oxford man who had gone up to Magdalen after 
Lodge's time, and who had lately made himself notice- 
able for a very pure and intelligent vein of reflective 
poetry. Daniel and Drayton were men of the best 
class, gentlemen who held themselves aloof from the 
vulgar struggle of the wits, and it is significant that 
they, and no longer the rough sort of professional 
pamphleteers, should appear as Lodge's friends and 
associates. 

He was now approaching the age of forty ; the new 
canons of literary taste which he had been among the 



36 Seventeenth Century Studies 

first to institute, were now being adopted by authors 
of far greater power and freshness than he. Shake- 
speare was in motion ; the riotous crew of the dramatists 
were lifting up their voices, and Lodge breathed along 
his oaten flute with less confidence, and betrayed a 
certain growing agitation year by year. The Fig for 
Momus marks his latest appearance as a poet, since 
the sonnets of the Margarite of America certainly, and 
those published in England's Helicon probably, were 
the work of several years prior to their publication. 
Lodge's satires, eclogues, and epistles are very mono- 
tonous in style, and do not command attention by 
their vigour and concision. The thought is rarely 
bright enough or the expression nervous enough to 
demand definite praise. The best that can be said of 
them is that they are lucid and Horatian, escaping the 
faults of those succeeding satirists who thought them- 
selves tame unless they took Persius, or even, perhaps, 
the Alexandra of Lycophron, as the model of their 
obscurity. 

In 1596 Lodge's activity as an original writer cul- 
minated, and practically closed. We possess no fewer 
than four distinct volumes published by him in that 
year. On the 15th of April he gave to the world his 
prose disquisition of The Devil Conjured. It is a 
tedious soliloquy on virtue, put into the mouth of a 
** virtuous and solitary Hermit called Anthony," and 
bears a sort of whimsical resemblance in its concep- 
tion, though certainly none in its execution, to the 
Tentation de St. Antoine of Flaubert. The author 
himself thought highly of this performance, and even 



Thomas Lodge 37 

went so far as contemptuously to describe his former 
poems and romances as mere corncockles, while this 
was the real wheat of his brain. The preface, indeed, 
is a palinode; there can be little doubt that he had 
now '^got religion," and that his early amorous writings, 
though always innocent, seemed to him to call for 
penitence. It appears from the dedication to Sir John 
Fortescue, that Lodge was now suffering from reports, 
and it is probable that he was already suspected of 
being a Catholic. 

This element in his nature is still more apparent, 
though yet not openly avowed, in Wzl^s Misery and 
the World's Madness^ another prose disquisition, of 
a pseudo-philosophical kind, which he issued from his 
house at Low Leyton, on the 5 th of November of the 
same year, 1596. The Lodge family had always been 
associated, more or less vaguely, with this village, 
which lies in the Hundred of Becontree, in Essex, 
about six miles to the north-east of London. The 
messuage or farm of Malmaynes, in the same hundred, 
was originally given by Lady Lodge in her will to her 
son Thomas, but the gift is set aside in a codicil, and 
certain lands on the borders of Suffolk and Essex, at 
or near Nayland, are bequeathed to the poet instead. 
Sir Thomas Lodge's house, however, had been at or 
near Low Leyton, and it may be conjectured that by 
some means or other his second son had come into 
possession of it. By this time, it would seem. Lodge's 
first wife was dead, and he had married Mrs. Jane 
Albridge (or Aldred), a widow lady, a Catholic, whose 
first husband had been a dependent of Lodge's early 



38 Seventeenth Century Studies 

patron, Sir Francis Walsingham, and who had herself 
been useful to the Catholics at Rome and other places 
in the days of their darkest persecution. This Mrs. 
Lodge has retained a minute niche in history as a 
cat^s-paw in the hands of the detractors of the Earl 
of Arundel during his imprisonment in the Tower in 
1586. 

Bearing these circumstances in mind, it is by no 
means extraordinary that a leaning towards Catholic 
psychology of the more obvious kind, such as we find 
it expressed in the Devil Conjured and in Wifs Misery 
and the World^s Madness^ should have taken the form 
of direct Romanism in the ^^ Prosopopeia, or Tears of 
the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctified Mary, the Mother of 
God.'' It has been doubted, I cannot conceive upon 
what grounds, whether this little treatise, although 
signed with the familiar letters T. L., is actually by 
our Thomas Lodge. It is true that in two copies 
these initials have been reversed by the printer, but, 
in my opinion the style of the text is sufficient to 
demonstrate that this is one of Lodge's genuine tracts, 
and the open profession of Catholic doctrine is no 
more than what we have been gradually prepared for 
by the whole tenor of the poet's career. If there is 
any cause for astonishment, it is that Lodge should 
have ventured to come forward under so thin a dis- 
guise, at a time when it was still dangerous to avow 
dissent from the Church of England. 

In the midst of this busy year, 1596, and in spite 
of all his denunciation of his early amatory writings. 
Lodge bethought him of the romance which he had 



Thomas Lodge 



composed in the Straits of Magellan in the winter of 
1592, and he published it on the 4th of May under the 
title of A Margarite of A^nerica, This is one of the 
prettiest of his stories. It has absolutely nothing to 
do with America, save the accident of its composition 
there ; it is a tragical narrative of the loves of Arsa- 
dachas, son and heir to the Emperor of Cusco, and 
Margarita, whose father was king of Muscovy, and 
who dwelt in a fortress '* situate by a gracious and 
silver-floating river, environed with curious planted 
trees to minister shade, and sweet-smelling flowers/^ 
Lodge has expended his richest fancy on this work; 
the heroine^s father cannot be murdered in his bed, 
but that this article of furniture is described as of 
black ebony, set about with rubies and carbuncles; 
the lady herself, summoned to her fate, pauses that 
she may decently array herself in a grass-green robe, 
embroidered with daisies; and if a political meeting 
is to be held by the nobles of Cusco, it has to be 
arranged in *'a fair arbour, covered with roses and 
honeysuckles, paved with camomile, pinks, and violets, 
and guarded with two pretty crystal fountains on 
every side." The passages of verse, sonnets, and 
canzonets are of the same sweet and mellifluous order, 
and recall the interludes of the Rosalynde, It does 
not seem to have been observed that the elaborate 
piece beginning — 

" With Ganymede now joins the shining sun," 

is an example, the earliest in English literature, of a 
sestina formed on the exact plan of that form of verse, 



40 Seventeenth Century Studies 

as invented by Arnaut Daniel and employed by Dante. 
An examination of the length of the lines and of the 
arrangement of the tornada shows that Lodge was 
following an Italian, and not a Provencal model. The 
latter, indeed, he could scarcely be expected to meet 
with. When we except the Rosalynde and the PhilliSj 
A Margarite of America is perhaps the work of 
Lodgers which will best reward the ordinary reader. 

Lodge now retired from the profession of poetry, 
and adopted that of medicine. According to Anthony 
a Wood, he took his degree of Doctor of Physic at 
Avignon. This must have been at least as early as 
1600, for in that year certain passages from his known 
poems were quoted in England's Parnassus with the 
attribution "Doctor Lodge.'' He also contributed 
original poems to England's Helicon^ a miscellany of 
the same year. As a physician, he rapidly attained 
a great reputation, and was ranked among the lead- 
ing Englishmen in the profession. On the 25th of 
October 1602, ''Thomas Lodge, Doctor of Physic, of 
the University of Avenion," was incorporated in the 
University of Oxford. In the same year he produced 
a version of the works of Josephus, which was so 
popular that between 1602 and 1670 it passed through 
no fewer than seven editions. In 1603 Lodge appeared 
for the last time before the public as an original author, 
with a Treatise of the Plague^ dedicated to the Lord 
Mayor and Corporation of London, and applicable to 
the epidemic at that moment raging in the city. Con- 
temporary allusions to him are not rare in the occasional 
literature of the early part of the seventeenth century. 



Thomas Lodge 41 

In the first act of that curious play The Return from 
Parnassus J which, though not printed until 1606, was 
acted in 1602, Lodge is thus referred to as a physician 
and as a Euphuist : — 

" For Lodge and Watson, men of some desert. 
Yet subject to a critic's marginal ; 
Lodge for his oar in ev'ry paper boat. 
He that turns over Galen ev'ry day, 
To sit and simper * Euphues' Legacy.' " 

In a manuscript ^* Poetical Common Place Book of 
a Cambridge Student," which was perhaps begun in 
161 1, there is a coarse satirical piece against ''London 
Physicians," in which Lodge is thus mentioned : — 

" And old Doctor Lodge, 
That leaues of to doge. 

Will you neuer leaue ? " 

This not very intelligible apostrophe possibly points 
to the fact that, in spite of his reputation — and in his 
Troia Britantca, in 1609, Hey wood had given him a 
place among the six most famous English doctors — 
Lodge was occasionally put to great straits for a liveli- 
hood. In the meantime I may be allowed to print 
for the first time a letter which exists among the 
Domestic State Papers, and which reveals something 
of the intrigues in which Lodge and his Catholic wife 
were unquestionably engaged : — 

" S"", havinge mett w^^ so convenient a messenger I canno 
but congratulate yo"" departure hence to Hue in such content- 
ment as their I heare you doe. w^^ as I wish more and more to 
increase so doubt I not but that you will alwayes be mindefull 
of y® well wisshinge frendes you have left behinde yo". In my 



42 Seventeenth Century Studies 

last lettre to you, I requested that M*^^ Lodge might haue con- 
tinued heare at leaste for some six or seaven monethes, but 
sithence that tyme havinge bin at the Moscovia house and not 
findinge that her stay heare might doe me the good I expected, 
and that I hould it no reasonable request so longe to disjoyne 
man and wief, I leave the orderinge of y^ busines to yo"" owne 
further consideracon. Wisshinge that Mr. Griffin for that my 
selfe shall be often absent from hence wer fully authorized by a 
lettre of Attorney from you, to haue the managinge of that 
busines from tyme to tyme. And that further you will write 
yo*" lettres as occason shall be offered to the M'' of the company 
and yo"" lettres of particular direction to M"^ Griffin or others to 
such effect as I shall from tyme to tyme require it. The 
shippinge w^^ went forth two yeare sithence is not yet all re- 
turned and theirfore no accoumpt past as yet of that viage, yet 
it is proffered that the fiftye pounde may goe in adventure this 
yeare againe w*^^ argueth that the principall remayneth whole, 
but yet cannot be gotten out, and theirfore I hould it best againe 
to adventure it, and so M^^ Lodge in yo'^ absence hath under- 
taken to doe. And some bodye must from tyme to tyme be 
heare to let the company what they will adventure or els the 
stocke for y^ yeare lieth deade. Notw^^standinge all the diffi- 
cultyes this age seemeth for this p^'sent to inviron us w*^ all, 
y^ we shall still be hable to drawe breath in England, and I 
hope ere it be longe to see you willinge and desirous to looke 
homewarde, for though much hath bin attempted against us in 
parliament yet, hitherto nothinge is done harder then of oulde, 
nor as I hope will be. I pray you S"" advertize me howe I 
might place Robin their, and what the charge would be to kepe 
him at his booke or what you thinke of it, if I could gett him 
placed w^^ S"" Willm Standley, and lett me heare sometymes from 
you I pray yo"^ we lye still at o'^ oulde lodginge. And thus 
w*^ my hartye commendacons & my wiues to you w*^ yo"" servants 
dutye I ende London this ix*^ of March 1605. 

" Yo^ lovinge frende 

"W. JENISON. 
" To the worshipfull his louinge frende 

" M"^ Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke." 



Thomas Lodge 43 

Our next glimpse of the poet-physician shows him 
to us once more setting out upon his travels. A 
memorandum on the Privy Council Registers, dated 
January loth, 16 1 6, mentions **A passe for Tho. 
Lodge, Doctor of Physic, and Henry Sewell, gent., 
to travel into the Arch-Duke's Country, to recover 
such debts as are due unto them there, taking with 
them two servants, and to return agayne in five 
moneths." It has been suggested that the real object 
of this journey was to avoid process on the part of 
AUeyn, who arrested Lodge immediately upon his 
return. Lodge seems to have left England again as 
soon as this trouble was over, and to have remained 
abroad, probably practising in the Low Countries, 
until 1 6 19. In his treatise called The Poor Man^s 
Talent, first printed in 1881, he describes a remedy 
''which,'' he says, "I have often tried in the Royal 
Hospital at Mecklin upon soldiers that grew lame by 
cold.'' But inquiries made at Malines have unfor- 
tunately resulted in the discovery of no record of his 
name or functions. 

Of Lodge's remaining years few memorials are in 
existence. That he was in easy circumstances may 
be gathered from the fact that in 161 2 he raised a 
monument in the Church of Rolleston, Notts, to the 
memory of his younger brother, Nicholas Lodge, lord 
of that manor, in whose will a legacy of two gold 
bracelets is made to the wife of the poet. In 16 14 
Lodge published a translation of the works of Seneca, 
and a copy of this book is in existence, given by Lodge 
to Thomas Dekker in the year of publication. About 



44 Seventeenth Century Studies 

1623 he compiled The Poor Mans Talent^ a medical 
text-book for the use of his wife's old patroness, Anne, 
Countess of Arundel. In this work Lodge uses ex- 
pressions which could only proceed from the mouth of 
a Catholic, and such a phrase as '* I will set down a 
remedy which St. Dominic revealed to a poor devout 
woman," leave us no room to doubt that by this time, 
at all events, he had definitely joined that communion 
to which he had all his life been leaning. 

Lodge became a very prominent practitioner during 
the last years of his life. His private house was still 
at Low Leyton, but he saw his London patients origi- 
nally in Warwick Lane, afterwards in Lambert Hill, 
and finally, shortly before his death, in Old Fish 
Street. He died, it is said, of the plague, in 1625, 
being then in his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year, 
and on the 1 2th of October of that year administra- 
tion of his effects was granted to his widow, Jane 
Lodge, who must herself have been an elderly woman 
at the time, her name having come forward in con- 
nection with the Arundel family just forty years 
before. 

Thomas Lodge was a strange compound of strength 
and weakness, of imitation and originality. His in- 
telligence and activity gave him a prominence in the 
literature of the time which his mind was hardly 
vigorous enough to sustain. He would have, as his 
satirist says, ** his oar in every paper boat,'* and could 
not conceive the possibility of failing in any depart- 
ment of literature. As a fact, however, he is a signal 
failure in drama, in satire, and in philosophy, and his 



Thomas Lodge 45 

unsuccessful efforts in these directions occupy a large 
section of his entire works. His almost servile attitude 
towards the bold affectations of Lyly would make us 
at one moment deny Lodge all true originality, if we 
were not immediately confronted by the fact that he 
was himself a pioneer in half-a-dozen fields of poetical 
invention. The introducer into English of the romantic 
epic, of the heroic satire, and of the heroic epistle, cannot 
be overlooked in any historical summary of our litera- 
ture. But Lodgers real excellence is as a lyrical poet, 
and in the richness of his fancy as a prose romancer. 

His prose style, judged by severe modern canons, 
or even compared with the poetical style of his own 
age, is not less intolerable than that of most of his 
contemporaries. English prose, as an instrument for 
the clear expression of unaffected thought, had hardly 
begun to exist. Lodgers best romances are as lucidly 
and gracefully written as was at that time possible. 
They never can, however, take again a living place in 
literature ; but this honour must not be denied to the 
best of their author^s songs and sonnets. In that 
glowing age no one could express the jubilant exu- 
berance of love with a fuller note, with a more 
luxurious music, with more affluent and redundant 
imagery. His intellectual languor prevents the com- 
plete, or rather the continuous expression of this 
golden ecstasy, and we are often left to wonder that 
a lyrist who was so thrilling a moment ago can now 
be so insipid. But in a few of his best songs he 
sustains his flight till the music is perfect, and in these 
he reaches the topmost level of success. The author 



4^ Seventeenth Century Studies 

of ''Like to the clear in highest sphere/^ was as 
genuine a poet as ever breathed, and whether in these 
moments of great inspiration, or in his hours of lassi- 
tude and extravagance, Lodge is always the very type 
and exemplar of a man of letters in the irregular and 
romantic age of Elizabeth. 

1882. 



JOHN WEBSTER 

Among those shrouded figures of the Elizabethan 
poets, to whom present popularity was a doubtful 
thing, and future fame scarcely dreamed of, who had 
no Vasari to perpetuate the humours and adventures 
of their lives, those who defied the world most have 
left the most definite personal impression behind them. 
Robert Greene, the dissolute bully, the remorseful 
rake, whose red beard flares in his own graceless 
stories, would hardly have been suspected as the out- 
ward man of that lyric spirit that wrote '*Ah! were 
she pitiful as she is fair,'* and that dreamed the strange 
pure Utopia of the Menaphon, If Greene, and Dekker, 
and Marlowe, the three scapegraces of the period, 
present such violent and unexpected features in their 
private lives, what eccentricities may not have charac- 
terised those other men, whose deeds cried out less 
loudly against them, and whose works have now no 
setting of biographical fact ? Among these latter 
figures, perhaps the most shadowy and indefinable is 
the one that bears the good English name of John 
Webster. When was he born ? No one has recorded. 
When did he die ? It is not known. His presence 
seems to hover about London, and is doubtfully con- 
nected in some gloomy fashion with the Church of St. 

47 



48 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Andrew's, Holborn. One miserable satirist has per- 
petuated his own obscure name by vilifying our poet 
with coarse and ridiculous abuse ; and this summary, 
with the dates of his productions, comprises the entire 
biography of a man who ranks as one of the most 
illustrious dramatists of modern Europe. Meagre 
enough, truly, is this life-history, so meagre, indeed, 
that editors have distended it with babbling discus- 
sions as to the authorship of certain tracts, violently 
Puritanic, and published when the poet must have 
been extremely aged ; of which controversy we need 
say nothing here, merely remembering that it is not 
very long since Mr. Sheridan Knowles, a dramatist of 
no mean talent, surprised us in his old age by a like 
change of opinion. All we can profitably do in the 
absence of characteristic anecdotes is to examine the 
priceless legacy of verse that this phantom-bard has 
left us, and seek there for the lineaments we cannot 
find elsewhere. 

A most unfortunate practice among many of the 
dramatic authors of the Elizabethan age, and one 
ensuing on their carelessness of posterity, was to unite 
together in the composition of single plays, a course 
still pursued by some playwrights in France. In most 
instances this destroys all possibility of studying the 
individual style of each poet ; in the case of Dekker, 
who carried the system of poetic partnership to excess, 
it has seriously impaired the reputation of a writer 
who, if we could only be sure that we had him in our 
grasp, was probably inferior to few of his time in certain 
great qualities. Happily Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, 



John Webster 49 

and Webster, the three brightest stars in the galaxy, 
usually avoided the practice, and hence the study of 
their style is easy. Webster, for instance, besides all 
combined work, has left four perfect dramas in which 
there is not a suspicion of any hand but his own. 
These four, all diverse in their detail, but uniform in 
the salient characteristics of style, are a tragedy of 
intrigue, a tragedy of the fatalist or iEschylean type, 
a tragi-comedy and an historical play. So strongly 
marked is the style in all these productions, that 
coming fresh from the study 'of them, I felt able unhesi- 
tatingly to identify and separate from the rubbish of a 
minor author a complete idyll of pure comedy. It is 
embedded in a play by Rowley, called A Cure for 
a Cuckoldj which has always been printed as a joint 
work of the two dramatists. So clumsily are the two 
plays united, that they can be separated scene by 
scene, without there being any doubt of the authorship 
of either. Webster's little drama, a thoroughly charac- 
teristic and very lovely work, has nothing whatever 
to do with the vulgar under-plot which suggested, 
properly enough, the existing title, and I cannot bear 
that a piece so pure and refined should be stigmatised 
by so repulsive and unmeaning a name. If some 
editor would but adopt my discovery, and reprint this 
little comedy without any dross of Rowley, a new 
name might be thought of to distinguish it by. But I 
hope presently to return to this point. 

After Shakespeare, Jonson comes, and after Jonson, 
Webster. We acknowledge no claimants to a share 
of their peculiar honour. In spite of the sweetness 

D 



50 Seventeenth Century Studies 

and wit of Beaumont and Fletcher, their want of 
originaHty, individuality, and sustained power places 
them in the second rank of dramatists, though they 
are honourably pre-eminent there. No one else, save 
Marlowe, who belongs to an earlier epoch, and stands 
alone, dares pretend to the foremost rank. Webster 
is far beneath Ben Jonson in scope and freshness of 
invention, in learning, and in the more obvious forms 
of comedy ; in versatility and in natural ease of dia- 
logue we must confess him also inferior to that great 
master. But, like Shakespeare, he is transcendental; 
his strong muse wings itself out of the common world, 
and sees things with the eye of a visionary. His 
scenes force us to a great solemnity ; the very jesting 
is bitter and of a sad echo ; without rousing any of 
the meaner passions, unalloyed by fear or any weak 
insistance on the forms of death, he yet leads through 
his sterner works such a mournful masque of cumu- 
lative anguish, that nothing but the great destiny on 
which all is seen to hang can reconcile us to the 
unutterable sorrow. The soft moderns of whom Theo- 
phile Gautier said in his scorn, *' lis n'admettaient que 
deux couleurs dramatiques, le bleu de ciel ou le vert 
pomme," will do well to fly with averted faces from 
John Webster, whose canvas is lurid with the colour 
of a thunder-cloud, and red with blood and flame. 
Those whose nervous systems still permit them to 
meditate on great physical and psychical crises will 
discover in him a tragical writer second only to Shake- 
speare, and in his Duchess of Malfy a masterpiece 
excelled, we venture to say, only by King Lear. 



John Webster 51 

Twice Webster has placed before us the subHme 
spectacle of a human soul, delicately organised, full 
of power and splendour, ruthlessly followed by a 
silent, dogged, remorseless fate to the inevitable close. 
Of most of his characters, we can say from the first, 
that they are '' fey ; " their doom is inscribed on their 
own faces. In the White Devilj Vittoria, like Faust, 
by renouncing principle for pleasure, gives up her 
soul to demons, who thenceforth never leave hold of 
their prey, but suggest and tempt, draw the gilded 
chains tighter and tighter, and at last drag her down- 
ward, with her last cry ringing in our ears — 

" I am lost for ever ! " 

In the Duchess of Malfy, on the contrary, we have 
a soul of exquisite virtue snared in a network of 
adverse influences, and by them overpowered, and to 
outward appearance miserably vanquished. But out 
of these adversities comes health, not indeed to the 
heroic victim, but to those around, who see, in the 
words of our poet, that — 

" Man, like to cassia, is proved best, being bruised." 

Though the most obvious, this insight into the true 
heart of tragedy is not the only excellence prominent 
in Webster. Strange indeed would it be if to this 
grandeur of invention were added no gifts of graceful 
and witty expression. Over the inevitable rosemary 
and yew he binds at first the vine-leaf and the laurel, 
and the conceptions of pleasure and a suave courtly 
life are fulfilled with a success only forgotten when 



52 Seventeenth Century Studies 

we are fearfully face to face with the realities of grief 
and death. In one play he has continued the happier 
strain to the close, and in another, after leading us to 
the brink of doom, he has relented and given back the 
lives half-forfeited. In this, as in so much else, he 
has shown himself a delicate as well as a sublime 
artist, one who ^' can breathe through silver" as well 
as blow through bronze, and one must seek his parallel 
rather in such later masters as Goethe and Hugo, 
than in such contemporaries as Ford and Tourneur, 
whose force makes us forgive, though it cannot con- 
ceal, their crudeness. 

Where Webster fails is not in crudeness. He was 
the most literary among the Elizabethans after Jonson, 
and he carried into his art some of the affectations of the 
purely literary spirit. The infinite tact of Shakespeare 
he vainly endeavoured to equal by study and art, as 
did Jonson, but Webster's source of failure was dia- 
metrically opposite to his rivaFs. Ben Jonson's plays 
stand or fall according to the success or the reverse 
of the principal character in each. At most, one or 
two personcB are modelled with care and completeness ; 
the rest are shadows and stage-puppets. Webster 
erred in the other extreme; in the eager effort to 
elaborate all parts of his production, he lost in general 
effect. In the Devil's Law Casey the attention becomes 
completely exhausted in following the development of 
a dozen characters, any one of whom would have been 
decisive enough to serve a minor playwright for hero 
or heroine. So Lionardo is said to have been held 
in constant check by the desire to work out an ideal 



John Webster 53 



of perfect beauty, not being willing to acknowledge 
that to inferior portions of a great work inferior atten- 
tion must needs be given. Hence Webster, in his 
turn weighted with the desire to give an impossible 
perfection to his studies of human nature, paused and 
loitered till life went by, and left less work of his to 
be garnered than any of his contemporaries. It is 
indeed little that we possess, but who shall overvalue 
its unique preciousness, or consent to lose one of the 
weighty lines ? This is the reward of careful writing ; 
we should all consent without much sorrow to the 
loss of many lines of Heywood and Middleton. There 
is no possibility of estimating what we have lost of 
Webster. The Guise may or may not have been a 
rifaccimento of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris^ but there 
are other plays of Webster's mentioned in the diary 
of Henslowe that could hardly have failed to be char- 
acteristic. The Two Harpies^ for instance, has a fas- 
cinatingly weird sound about it, and may have been 
something very wild and iEschylean. 

The versification of Webster is vigorous and often 
musical. It strikes a golden mean between the stiff 
march of Marlowe's serried lines and Fletcher's languid 
excess of laxity. Before Shakespeare the dramatists 
were all buckled up in plate-armour; after him they 
lounged about ungirdled and loose-shod. Webster 
and Jonson were permitted to walk abreast of their 
divine rival. It is noticeable that Webster some- 
what persistently eschews soliloquy, the department 
of the drama best adapted for the display of musi- 
cal blank verse. How much wild melody he could 



54 Seventeenth Century Studies 

throw into his lines, the celebrated speech of Francisco 
shows : — 

" I left them winding of Marcello's corse," &c. 

And sentences full of a peculiar delicate music surprise 
one in each of Webster^s works. His earliest known 
lines, those prefixed to a work of Anthony Munday^s, are 
very striking for a power of versification at that time 
rare. We have it on Webster's own declaration that he 
was a very slow and careful composer, and it is evident 
that he studied the effect of sound in his dramas. 

It cannot possibly be needful in these days, when 
whoever will may buy Webster's entire works for a 
few shillings, to tell the stories of his plays. That is 
quite beside our purpose. It will be better as briefly 
as possible to show what are the prominent character- 
istics, the main successes, the most obvious beauties 
of each of the dramas, and to interpret as far as lies in 
our power a great artist whose masterpieces remain 
comparatively unknown and misapprehended. In 1612, 
when, as far as we can guess, Webster was about 
thirty-five years of age, the White Devily the earliest 
of his dramas, was printed. It is to be regretted that 
either his exceeding slowness of composition, or the 
evil reception this play met with from the public, did 
not permit Webster to carry out what we like to think 
was his original project. The play, as it at present 
stands, is not divided into acts and scenes, slurs over 
incidents, and even represents prominent crises by 
dumb show. It reads like the first draft of a trilogy, 
and it may be held that the poet's original intention 



John Webster 55 

was to treat the subject in a trilogical manner, ending 
the first two dramas at the murders of Isabella and 
Marcello respectively. Expanded thus by the masterly 
hand of its inventor, the tragedy would have possessed 
an immense power over every careful reader ; an influ- 
ence weakened at present by the thinness of execution. 
The death of Isabella, now almost comic in the conjuror's 
description, would have brought a world of grand ideas 
to the poet's mind, when he had to wind up a solemn 
drama with it, and the elaboration of minor characters, 
in which he so delighted, would then have been appro- 
priate and needful. As it is, there is more in this great 
sketch than we can ever hope to fathom. 

The scene is laid, where our old dramatists love to 
lay it, in Italy, and the characters are all true to their 
ItaHan birthright. Vittoria herself, the White Devil, 
with all her grace and subtlety, her implacable warm 
passions, her never-failing wit and splendid dupli- 
city, is a woman not to be found out of sight of the 
Apennines. What passes through those bright rosy 
lips can never be trusted ; sift every word by fact and 
effect, if you would guess the truth. If we had not 
heard her charnel-house dream, horribly suggestive 
of robbery and murder, no storming of Monticelso, no 
reproaches of Brachiano, would induce us to condemn 
one so overpoweringly frank and brave. We are 
reminded of Shelley and his Beatrice Cenci, and the 
old poet is no whit put out of countenance by the 
comparison. The trial-scene has been the admiration 
of every critic. Charles Lamb's quaint praise of it is 
known to every one, but we hold he exaggerates the 



56 Seventeenth Century Studies 

effect of Vittoria's ''innocence-resembling boldness" 
upon our minds ; surely Monticelso^s altogether extra- 
vagant abuse has as much to do with the favour we 
feel for her as her own rather brazen confidence. 

The character of Flamineo is one of the cleverest 
creations of Webster ; he is a thorough rascal, yet he 
interests us exceedingly, and is consistent throughout. 
Less cruel than lago, he is almost as base, and equally 
heartless, but there is a slight flavour of loyalty about 
him; the regard he bears in his mean way for his 
sister prevents our absolute disgust. He is the very 
incarnation of sordid prosiness ; nothing awes, nothing 
checks him, except positive danger to himself When 
Cornelia breaks in like a ghost upon the scheming trio, 
with her prophetic denunciation and bitter reproach : 

" Never dropped mildew on a flower here 
Till now!" 

the effect on Vittoria is sudden though brief repent- 
ance, on Brachiano a pang of accusing conscience, but 
on Flamineo nothing whatever save surprise at his 
colleague's weakness and annoyance at his mother's 
interruption. This marvellous serenity is thoroughly 
characteristic of him : when the murders are completed, 
and his accomplices agitated and doubtful, Flamineo's 
activity and frivolity are as amazing as ever : he puts 
Marcello, his virtuous young brother, out of the way 
with the most cheerful alacrity. When Brachiano is 
poisoned, he becomes slightly alarmed, but is soon 
cracking his bitter jests over the corpse. Brachiano's 
ghost, following the exhibitions of his mother's frenzied 



John Webster 57 

grief, awes him for a little while, and then how grandly 
does he address the ghost, pointing to heaven, ^'yon 
starry gallery," and hell, *' that cursed dungeon ! ^* 
Brachiano having gone back to his own place, which- 
ever that was, Flamineo relapses again into callous 
frivolity, and resumes his avaricious designs. 

The scene with his sister at last is very masterly. 
She is the only creature on earth whom he hesitates 
to put out of his way by murder. Vittoria^s calmness 
and presence of mind do not leave her when her 
brother threatens her with the horrible private slay- 
ing. Her repartees are as shrewd as ever, only a little 
sadder. When she supposes that she has shot her 
brother, and is undeceived by his suddenly leaping at 
her, for the first time she quails. She is weak, and her 
weakness is discovered. But when Ludovico bursts in 
with his rabble, all her courage returns, and she is a 
queen again. Pale and stern and beautiful she dies, 
with the words of wonderful despair on her lips : 

" My soul, like to a ship in a black storm, 
Is driven, I know not whither ! " 

Very different is Flamineo^s death ; he, too, has no 
cowardly shrinking, he is stolid as ever, and how bitter 
are his words of dying mockery ! This final scene is 
the very acme of depravity ; the blossom of sin fully 
ripened into the fruit of punishment, but with infinite 
grace and sweet underlying pathos the poet has made 
a streak of dawning light break out in the east. From 
the utter darkness of the finale, we can for a moment 
before the curtain falls glance at the young Giovanni, 



58 Seventeenth Century Studies 

virtuous and brave, rising like the morning star, to 
herald peace and good-will to men. 

Monticelso, the Cardinal, who afterwards becomes 
Pope, is strikingly drawn. In the trial, with truly 
clerical want of tact, he lets his indignation at the 
sin of the fair culprit overstep all bounds, and create 
a sympathy for her. However wicked she was, our 
sympathies arraign themselves at once on the side 
of a lady attacked with such intolerable coarseness. 
Francesco, who is not half so honest as Monticelso, is 
able to seem a more righteous judge. Yet we cannot 
but admire the impulsive Cardinal; his speech to 
Ludovico in earnest reprimand of his intended crime, 
is a masterpiece in Webster^s moral manner. When 
he perceives that his warning produces no impression 
on this inveterate ruffian, how fine is his sudden 
impatience : 

" Instruction to thee 
Comes like sweet showers to overhardened ground, 
They wet, but pierce not deep. And so I leave thee, 
With all the Furies hanging round thy neck ! " 

Brachiano is too hardened a reprobate to excite any 
sympathy, and he lacks the intellectual interest that is 
excited by Flamineo^s vagaries. His death is frightful 
and shrieking ; he is mocked and tormented to the last, 
Vittoria alone showing any regard for him. For her 
his death is a prophetic warning ; from that moment 
she is doomed. 

" I am lost for ever ! " 

is her cry of despair and remorseful agony. 

The episode of Marcello^s death and funeral is the 



John Webster 59 

most poetical passage in the play, rendered with some- 
thing of the lyrical sweetness of Dekker in his best 
moments. We are made to feel it to be necessary for 
the fulfilment of the tragic idea, that he, the one good 
fruit among these apples of Sodom, should be removed, 
so that the family, the salt of virtue thus taken from 
them, might perfect their moral putrefaction. The 
dirge sung over him by Cornelia is universally admired, 
and more widely known perhaps than any part of the 
works of John Webster. 

The play is full of fine lines and scattered images. 
We shall not find many more striking than this an- 
nouncement to Francesco of the murder of Isabella : 

" My lord, untie your folded thoughts, 
And let them dangle loose as a bride's hair : 
Your sister's poisoned ! " 

The best words with which to sum up the scope and 
destination of the play are those of Brachiano, when 
for the first time he catches sight of the baleful in- 
fluence on himself and others which Vittoria has, and 
addressing her says : 

" Thou hast led me like a heathen sacrifice, 
With music and with fatal yokes of flowers, 
To my eternal ruin ! " 

The Duchess of Malfy has been, without question, 
the most popular work of Webster, the one most 
often read and praised, and even laid open to the 
general public in elegant extracts and the like, a 
delicate form of semi-literary luxury altogether foreign 
to the genius of this man, yet not perhaps quite 



6o Seventeenth Century Studies 

unknown to him in the shape of Miscellanies and 
Englajid's Parnassus. Not in any of these l^Tical 
hodge- podges, where Sylvester's sonnets elbow 
Sidney's, and the most laboured dulness is mingled 
with the most refined wit, does the name of John 
Webster flourish. For him was reserved till a later 
age the honour of genteel mutilation in Collections 
for the Youngs and even here little appears but the 
death-scene of the Duchess. The true lover of his 
fame regrets even this exhibition. The scene we 
refer to no more represents the play than a single 
joint represents a man. It is a fragment, horribly 
edged and repulsive, in elaborate incompleteness. It 
is necessary that we be fully aware of the previous 
character of all parties, and the strokes of fortune 
or crime that have gradually placed them in so 
critical a position. Only when such a knowledge 
is complete, and it can become so only after long 
and thoughtful study, do we perceive the aim of the 
drama, and the great lesson running through the 
whole of it. 

This, surely, may be summed up thus : men are 
placed by God in varied positions, dependent one 
on another, and usuall}^ so hemmed in by the con- 
ventions of society, that they act with sameness, 
and more by fashion than b}^ principle. But now 
and then one and another are called out to take an 
individual position, and act in ways altogether novel 
and startling. Then it is that the real nobiHty of 
character or the reverse makes itself apparent. A 
knob of cassia may lie quiet in a box beside a lump 



John Webster 6i 

of gum-arabic, and no difference or slight be per- 
ceived between them. Let them then be taken out 
and crushed, *' bruised," as Webster has it ; the cassia 
fills the air with aromatic fragrance, the other has 
lost the little comeliness it possessed. This refine- 
ment of a noble mind by suffering is the keynote 
to the Duchess of Malfy^ and the wretchedness that 
comes upon her only illuminates and purifies her 
lovely character. 

Where Webster found the story appears to be 
uncertain. There exists a dramatic version of it. El 
Mayerdomo de la Duquessa de Amalfi^ among the 
works of Lope de Vega, and it forms the subject of 
one of the Novelle of Bandello. In Webster^s version 
the Duchess is presented before us as a woman of 
supreme rank and high spirit, whose power of mind 
and healthiness of purpose have kept her uncon- 
taminated by the frivolous conventionality of a court- 
life. She dares to act for herself; though a sovereign, 
she does not forget she is a woman, and sees nothing 
ignoble in the faithful love of a subject. She loves 
Antonio, a lord of her court, a man of the utmost 
integrity and as high-minded as herself. As Mr. 
Dyce has pointed out, this is a position of great peril 
for the author, but he triumphs in the difficulty. The 
scene in which the Duchess declares her passion is 
one of the most wonderful in the works of any drama- 
tist. Her fine flutterings when she has dismissed 
her maid, Cariola, and is awaiting her treasurer, the 
amusing and yet touching way in which they each 
manoeuvre, and hint and probe their mutual desires^ 



62 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Antonio^s modesty and intelligence, his brave little 
justification of his true-heartedness — 

" Were there nor heaven nor hell 
I should be honest. I have long served Virtue, 
And never taken wages of her — " 

her exquisite delicacy of condescension, his just but 
not abject expressions of unv^orthiness, unite to form 
one of the most beautiful pictures a dramatist ever 
painted. 

It is difficult to admit that Antonio deserves the 
charge of dulness and poorness which some critics 
have brought against him; his mind is of a fine 
calibre, if not very deep, yet very serious and honest ; 
his sententiousness may be somew^hat in the vein of 
Polonius, but is very consistent with his general 
character, thus forming another instance of the scrupu- 
lous care with which Webster worked up even his 
minor personc^. All through we cannot but feel that 
the Duchess is at all points his superior; in the 
intensely pathetic parting (close of Act III.) she is 
loftier than he, even in her despair : 

" My laurel is all withered ! " 

After this Antonio becomes a nonentity; his appear- 
ances are unaccountable and useless, and his death a 
burlesque. Yet in his dying speech the old Antonio 
accent is audible again, sententious to the last. 

Bosola is, no doubt, the cleverest male invention of 
Webster. He is the peculiar of the author; his 
speeches, humours, turns of thought, are Websterian 



John Webster 63 

exclusively. How strange are his pungent bitter- 
ness and sombre railing! Did the Clerk of St. An- 
drew's, Holborn, talk so among his contemporaries, and 
mystify them, we wonder? Some of Bosola's acrid 
sayings are unfathomable. We must not think be- 
cause he is the bane of every one, that he is a thorough 
rogue. His better nature constantly peeps out. He 
knows and cares nothing for the Duchess ; he thinks 
no great harm can come of Ferdinand's spy system ; 
he is that prince's liege servant, and to be paid well 
for these inscrutable services. So he proceeds to 
watch the Duchess, and informs accordingly. We 
listen with wonder to his lashing tongue, but soon 
perceive that his fantastic conceits perplex more than 
offend the victims of his sarcasm. 

In Act IV., when the blow has fallen, melted at last, 
Bosola lays aside his cynicism, and speaks out boldly 
to Ferdinand. At the death-scene, he is executioner, 
but evidently hates his cruel work, and to carry off 
his part, he is obliged to return more extravagantly 
than ever to his fantasies. In the brutal butchering 
in Act v., Bosola is nothing, and his dying remorse and 
regret vapid and worthless. Never did grand play end 
so wretchedly, unless Hamlet be similarly condemned. 

In all that pertains to the unnamed Duchess, Webster 
stands out among his later tragic rivals as Chopin did 
among the Romantic poets and painters of his time. 
It is as though he interpreted the thoughts of the others 
in an art more subtle and refined than theirs. The 
character of the heroine is revealed with splendid effect 
in one scene in Act III. A happy bride, gay and witty, 



64 Seventeenth Century Studies 

she sits in her chamber braiding her hair ; falling into 
a fit of musing, and left unconsciously alone by her 
playful companions, her thought is turned from the 
joyous present to the dim future. Before her pass 
the images of Eld and Death, and she sees her own 
bright head whitened with the orris-powder of grey 
hairs. Such a moment is chosen for the horrible in- 
rushing of her implacable brother. She is discovered; 
the die is cast; calmly she accepts her fate, but all 
dreams of life and love are done with ; she can never 
smile again. From this moment her character grows 
broader and more spiritual, till at last she seems 
physically dead. Her natural vivacity is all gone, 
and her replies have a hollow and passionless accent, 
as if they came from another world, and as though 
the sweet lips that utter them were dust laid out of 
sight. How queenly she dies, in contrast with poor 
Cariola^s screaming and scratching ! 

Nowhere does the subtle magician, the painstaking 
analyst of obscure humanity, triumph more than when 
he depicts the brother of the Duchess. Never could 
there be more temptation for a dramatist not fully 
master of his work to present a puppet rather than a 
man to a not too critical audience. Yet Webster, bent 
upon the perfection of his work, has expended on these 
detestable persons the most careful skill. Throughout 
the plot we are reminded of a later, and yet more pro- 
foundly moving tragedy, the Clarissa of Richardson, 
and the resemblance is increased by the likeness of 
the Duke and Cardinal to the insolent brother and 
aggravating sister of the peerless *' Clary." In both 



John Webster 65 

cases a willing blindness and a stupid regard for the 
supposed family honour unite with avarice in urging 
the persecution of one who blooms in a barren family 
like a lily among thorns. It is somewhat astonishing 
that during the two years between Acts II. and III. 
the Duke, notwithstanding his knowledge of the 
Duchesses marriage, does not act against her. At last 
his weak brain dissolves into frenzy, and this is really 
the only true feature in the fifth act. His death is 
confounded in the final general butchery. 

In considering this strange drama as a whole, its 
marvellous originality must strike us at once. The 
treatment adopted for this wild story by Webster is 
such as would have occurred to no other mind. Three 
men of that period assimilate more or less closely with 
our poet, and form a group whose members revelled 
in the sombre and the violent. But how differently 
would this story have been treated by each of them ; 
The southern imagination of Marlowe would have ex- 
pended a wealth of voluptuous colour on so passionate 
a subject, but we should have missed much tenderness 
and subdued grace, much conceited wit, and hardly have 
gained, perhaps, in general impressiveness. Marlowe 
was strongly imbued with the sense of the glory of 
colour that served to render deathless the great Vene- 
tians of a century before ; Webster, on the other hand, 
had little feeling for it. He views hope and love and 
beauty from their purely emotional side; he is ex- 
quisitely human, and in his sadness, remorseful and 
unupbraiding. We find no traces in Webster of such 
personal swayings of passion as surge in the pages of 

£ 



66 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Marlowe; but neither can be found in him the utter 
weight of woe that characterises the other two members 
of the '* Satanic School." Cyril Tourneur, in his two 
remarkable and unworthily neglected plays, exhibits 
an unfathomable grief, suggestive of the despair of a 
lost soul. His Hues linger as if falling from burdened 
lips. Life seems to him a mere stage for sorrows ; he 
knows not joy even by hearsay ; actual physical enjoy- 
ments are to him mere gall and ashes, even in desire. 
What weight of horror must have lain on the mind of 
this remarkable and obscure person ! We picture him 
to ourselves as a masculine Emily Bronte, afflicted with 
an incurable malady of the soul. We shudder to think 
with what blackness of plumes, with what darkness of 
congealed and mysterious blood, he would have illus- 
trated the story of our Duchess. Last of the gloomy 
quartette comes Ford, a soul in a different mould still — 
delicate, passionate, weak, worn out with the yearning 
of obstinate desire — puling for the moon like a child, 
and refusing in morbid feebleness of appetite the 
ordinary diet of men — the Charles Baudelaire of his 
age. With him, too, our mighty Webster has little 
in common but the superficial colour ; and it is doubtful 
whether Ford would have even cared to accept the 
story as it now stands for the illustration of his ideas. 
In theatrical arrangement, in study and clearness of 
character, it is not needful to point out by how very 
much both Ford and Tourneur are the inferiors of the 
subject of this essay. 

The Duchess of Malfy is full of faults; and it would 
need but a shallow wit to point them out. Webster 



John Webster 6"] 



erred, as we have said, in attempting an altogether 
impossible perfection, and in consequence worked 
some portions up with the minute accuracy of a 
miniature, and left some mere gaps of crude colour. 
But it is not with his faults, but with his excellences, 
that we are engaged. We can hardly account for the 
want of taste and art shown in the fifth act, unless on 
the not unplausible assumption that the poet, having 
destroyed the lovely Duchess, in whom all his in- 
tellectual interest had centred, found his energies 
droop and his vivacity decline when she no longer 
formed the heart of the action. 

The DeviVs Law CasCj which seems to contain a 
reference to the Massacre at Amboyna in 1623, and 
which nevertheless bears that date on its title-page, 
follows the Duchess of Malfy by about six years. In 
some respects it is an exceedingly faulty production ; 
there is no great central idea on which the plot wheels 
as on an axis ; there are no characters whose personal 
charm constrains our admiration ; the structure of the 
piece is as bad as it well could be ; the denouement is 
vague and unsatisfactory ; the spirit running through 
it is a mixture of spurious tragedy, and comedy which 
arouses no glimmer of a smile. On the other hand, 
it abounds above all the works of its author in lines 
and passages of unique and peculiar beauty, and some 
of lis personcB are drawn with a consummate art and 
consistency. 

Before we can enter on any disquisition on the 
DeviPs Law Case, it is necessary to blot from our 
memories the irritating presence of the lawyers, who 



68 Seventeenth Century Studies 

are introduced with such a waste of subtlety. The 
fatiguing loquacity and intrigues of Crispiano and 
Ariosto must be forgotten ; and before our eyes we 
must place the five prime movers in the play — namely, 
the members of Romelio's family : himself, mother and 
sister, and the two suitors. The plot, which at first 
merely dazes and confounds, stripped of its accessories, 
is simply this : Jolenta, secretly plighted to Contarino, 
is in vain required to marry Ercole by her brother 
Romelio, a merchant. The mother of Jolenta and 
Romelio, Leonora, secretly loves Contarino, and there- 
fore urges Ercole upon her daughter. The rivals fight 
a duel, in which both are seriously wounded; and 
Romelio, finding that Contarino has left his property 
to Jolenta, thinks to make sure by stabbing him in 
his sick-bed. Leonora, to revenge her lover, brings a 
charge of illegitimacy against her son. The charge 
is overthrown ; and she is about to suffer for libel, 
when Ercole and Contarino, who have recovered, 
appear in succession, and all the persons form a 
tableau. 

What is the upshot of it all is not clear. A dull 
and repulsive plot this must certainly be confessed 
to be, but yet, in the hands of Webster, it admits of 
no little talent in character painting. The family of 
Romelio resemble one another in many points — they 
are all passionate, perverse, and reserved. They all 
combine in deceiving one another ; from the beginning 
they bring this coil of trouble on themselves by being 
so very crafty towards one another. Leonora hints 
her love to Contarino in so mystical a way that he 



John Webster 69 



never suspects her aim. He, on the other hand, 
thinks himself wondrously clever in asking for her 
picture — meaning her daughter. Thus they outwit 
each other. The mother and children are amusingly 
self-willed. The scene in which Romelio tries to 
force Ercole on Jolenta is a masterly one. Jolenta is 
quite calm and decided; she uses the exact phrases 
that are most suited to irritate Romelio; the latter 
blusters, threatens, embarrasses modest Ercole, but 
gains little by it all. Leonora's little selfish by-play 
is cleverly brought in. At last poor Jolenta is over- 
whelmed, but she is still inflexible; she merely 
yields to the physical oppression of the moment, 
and is peculiarly gracious to Contarino in sheer 
wilfulness. 

So these precious relatives quietly flout one another, 
and consequently upon their schemings a difference 
arises between the suitors, and Contarino challenges 
Ercole to fight a duel. This quarrel has been highly 
lauded by Charles Lamb, as being " well arranged 
and gentlemanlike." It has additional interest in the 
play because the two rivals who thus engage are by 
far the most pleasing characters introduced. Ercole, 
especially, is a man 

" Whose word is still led by a noble thought, 
And that thought followed by as fair a deed." 

Romelio is a very different being, '*a glorious devil, 
large in heart and brain, that did love" money only. 
He is almost invariably made to speak in a poetical 
strain ; he is a voluble theorist in virtue. It is there- 



yo Seventeenth Century Studies 

fore quite consistently that the exquisite passage on 
honourable activity flows from his lips : — 

" Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds 
In the trenches for the soldier ; in the wakeful study 
For the scholar ; in the furrows of the sea 
For men of our profession ; of all which 
Arise and spring up honour." 

With such flowrets of morality does the glib merchant 
adorn his conversation. No wonder poor Contarino 
is lost in admiraion, and even the reader is startled to 
find what a very different sort of person Romelio is 
behind the scenes. His avarice is grasping and pitiless, 
his lust of gold akin to Barnabas in iho: Jew of Malta, 
The same man who could with fluent solemnity preach 
the cause of virtue to Contarino, says to his sister 
presently, of the same gentleman and Ercole : — 

" I have a plot shall breed 
Out of the death of these two noblemen 
The advancement of our house ! " 

He is a magnificent Pecksniff*, who has so long per- 
suaded the world to believe in him that at last he 
believes in himself. Even murder has no terror for 
him, and as **an Italianated Jew'* he plays the rogue 
finely. 

Poor Leonora in the frenzy of her irrepressible love 
is very pitiable, and her grief makes her eloquent. 
When she is lying, worn out, on the floor, and answers 
the questioning priest by saying, 

" I am whispering to a dead friend ! " 

she rises to sublimity of that subdued kind character- 



John Webster 7^ 

istic of the Elizabethan dramatists. Her sudden and 
unnatural rage against her son is very fantastic, and 
treated in a most repulsive way. Indeed, the last two 
acts of the DeviVs Law Case, describing Leonora^s 
suit, which is deviHsh enough in all conscience, are 
unredeemed by any beauty of plot or character. But 
although the persons lose all hold over our attention, 
the passages of pure poetry are more numerous than 
ever; Romelio turns ballad-monger and becomes 
Skeltonian in his lyric cynicism. This Satanic play 
is one from which the reader is inclined to draw 
copious extracts for frequent pleasurable reference, 
but hardly to toil through its obscure labyrinth again. 
It is not a long work, fortunately; as RomeHo re- 
marks, with his usual acumen, 

" Bad plays are the worse for their length ! " 

As if desirous that posterity might judge of his skill 
in every branch of the higher drama, Webster^s next 
effort was an historical one. Appius and Virginia 
was the most popular of his works on the stage of 
that day, and was the only one that seems to have 
been resuscitated after the Restoration. Still later it 
was rewritten in the popular style of the day by the 
illustrious John Dennis, while another critic of the 
times of Charles IL, who had all the lofty disdain 
of a Gallomaniac for the rough polish of Webster, 
informs us that *' the ingenious Mr. Betterton altered 
and bettered this piece." We may forgive the pun 
and eschew the elegant emendations of these later 
wits. The subject so eloquently told by Livy was a 



72 Seventeenth Century Studies 

favourite one with the English public. One of those 
curious interludes which form the connecting link 
between the old moralities and the regular drama, had 
treated the story in a jingling way, but Webster did 
not draw his inspiration from that trickling fountain, 
nor apply to the ever-bubbling well of his own inven- 
tion, but kept very close to Livy, and was only saved 
by his strong impersonifying habit of mind from falling 
into the mere historic dulness of such plays as Perkin 
Warbeck or Sejanus. 

It is difficult to imbue the most pathetic history 
with poetic life; the rigidity of fact leaves too little 
room for the play of imagination. Even in Shake- 
speare, FalstafF and Pistol and Bardolph have for 
us more living reality by far than the once actually 
breathing Worcester and Hotspur, and the poet is 
more easy in painting them. One of the sweetest 
singers of our century, speaking to Love, the sove- 
reign Power, says : — 

" All records, saving thine, come cool and calm, 
And shadowy, through the mist of passed years ; 
For others, good or bad, hatred and tears 
Have become indolent." 

And all the life and worth left in such a record as this 
Roman tale consist in the light of immortal passion 
gleaming around the men and women, whose hopes 
and fears and tremulous pleasures were identical with 
those we daily experience. ^ 

It is manifest that to produce a really lasting drama,* 
founded on an historical basis, the dramatist must 
remember this fact, and insist most prominently on 



John Webster 73 

the emotions of his personcB. Webster in writing 
Appius and Virginia either pandered to the popular 
taste of the hour, or failed to attain his own high 
standard. This play is classical and' cold ; to say it 
is illuminated by no flashes of pathos and originality 
would be to deny its authorship, but the general effect 
is frigid. The love of Icilius and Virginia, with which 
might have been inwoven much fervid colour and 
passionate fancy, has been coolly passed over. The 
character of the heroine is sketched with so light a 
pencil that we are left in uncertainty as to the features 
of her soul. The interest of the play centres around 
the good and the bad heroes, Virginius and Appius 
Claudius. The former is on all occasions displayed 
as a mirror of virtue ; the latter, with much novelty 
and freshness of treatment, as a worldly-wise rogue. 
The crafty decemvir, with his Janus-head of virtue 
in word and vice in action, is a creation worthy of 
Webster^s subtle intellect. A word or hint shows us 
the laborious course of plottings which have placed 
him at last on the curule chair. He is no novice, but 
a perfect adept, in the art of cozening. Yet having 
attained the full height of his ambition, his care 
slackens and the first and fatal error is made from 
this pinnacle. The faithful accomplice of his crimes, 
the execrable Marcus, starts at the discovery of his 
patron^s weakness. He sees the danger which Appius 
is too much dazzled by success to see. All this intri- 
cate imagining we owe to Webster and not to the 
unvarnished tale of Livy. We can only swiftly indi- 
cate the power and beauty which are expended on the 



74 Seventeenth Century Studies 

character of Virginius, but even he is too declamatory 
and cold. There is a vein of languor running through 
Appius and Virginia which is quite foreign to its 
author^s stalwart and active genius ; and it is impos- 
sible to put away from one the conviction that its 
composition was a labour forced upon him by personal 
need or the entreaty of a manager. ^' It is far more 
'' correct/' in an Augustan and Drydenic sense, than 
his other dramas, and was accordingly, as we have 
seen, the only one successfully revived at the Resto- 
ration. 

The play brought out by Kirkman in 1661, under 
the title of *M Cure for a Cuckold^ by John Webster 
and William Rowley,^' has never hitherto obtained the 
attention it deserves. Mr. Dyce is sceptical, as well 
he may be, of Kirkman's probity, but thinks there are 
traces of Webster in it ; Mr. W. C. Hazlitt does not 
hazard any opinion save that '* it is not a White Devil 
or a Duchess of Malfy^^'^ which is self-evident. No 
one has yet pointed out, what we claim as a discovery, 
that, far from the obscurity of mingled authorship 
which usually attends a compound play, the respective 
scenes of this may, with a little care, be labelled 
"Webster," '^Rowley,'' without a shadow of reason- 
able doubt. We take it that the matter stood thus : 
William Rowley, the passably clever author of A 
Shoemaker' s a Gentleman^ a dramatist who never rose 
to any eminence in serious composition, had on his 
hands a short town-comedy, suited to the vicious taste 
of the day, to which he had given the appropriate 
name on Kirkman's title-page. But this not being 



John Webster 75 

long enough for representation, and from its nature 
not being capable of much expansion, Rowley asked 
Webster, as a dramatist in high repute, for a comedy 
whose plot might be interwoven with his own. Webster 
glanced at his friend^s little play, found its subject 
uncongenial to him, but consented to write a short 
high comedy, which Rowley might join with his own 
low comedy as well as he could. 

The consequence is that the spirit of the two dramas 
clashes continually; consistent alone, viewed together 
they are most inconsistent. Webster's characters are 
noble, sententious, gentleman-like ; Rowley's are ribald, 
vulgar, ignoble. This is seen to perfection in the cases 
of WoodrofF, Luce, and Franckford, who are supposed 
to bear the mutual relationship of brother, sister, and 
husband. WoodrofF, whose action is confined to the 
upper section of the play, is a serene and virtuous 
figure in Webster's finest style. His sister Luce and 
her husband, whose station is almost wholly in the 
lower section, are coarse and vulgar, with a vulgarity 
wholly foreign to our poet. Not to enter wearisomely 
into this matter, we will merely beg the reader to 
judge for himself whether the bridal party in A Cure 
for a Cttckold and the various incidents that follow 
upon it are not obviously the exclusive property of 
Webster. They may be judged as a complete work 
by themselves, and to release us from the offensive 
existing title, correct enough as far as regards Rowley's 
section, we would suggest the adoption of a new title 
for this play. Perhaps, in the absence of authority, 
we may be allowed to suggest provisionally that of 



76 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Lovers Graduate^ a name justified by a speech of Clarets 
in the opening scene, and by the general succession of 
events with regard to her. 

The purity and stateHness of the verse impress one 
from the first. No such musical lines fell from the 
pen of William Rowley ; the blank verse of that author 
is extremely tame, and has a tendency to fall into 
rhyme at the most inappropriate moments, as if the 
shadow of the decadence had already fallen on him, 
and he prophesied of Dryden. He confines himself 
to prose in his share of the present work. To return 
to Lovers Graduate. The first act is occupied with a 
bridal party, convened to the marriage of Annabel and 
Bonville. The guests converse with all the suavity 
and florid grace appropriate to the occasion; as we 
always notice in Webster^s work, there is a lack of 
passionate utterance, but there is a quiet joyousness 
and golden indolence akin to the hazy beauty of a 
summer afternoon, which atone for the characteristic 
lack of amorous fervour. 

This little idyll, so long and so completely neglected 
that it seems like some Pompeian jar, faultless and 
fragile, suddenly revealed uninjured, with its bright 
frieze of dancers as fresh as when they were painted, 
has a special claim to respectful consideration. In it, 
while detecting everywhere those peculiarities of style 
and feeling which we have learned to look for in 
Webster^s work, we also discover traits' nowhere else 
discernible. This sense of quiet enjoyment, which we 
have pointed out as characterising the opening act, is 
hardly to be found, in so full a measure at least, in any 



John Webster "]"] 

of the plays we have already examined. If, as we 
believe, Lovers Graduate is the product of his later years, 
it would give us some ground for supposing that ease 
and competence mellowed the gloomy spirit of his 
youth, and developed to more perfection the graceful 
and reflective instincts of his imagination. 

The interest mainly centres round the quartette, 
Annabel and her newly-married consort, and the un- 
linked lovers, Lessingham and Clare. The last of 
these is very cleverly contrasted with Annabel ; if two 
words nowadays misused ad nauseam may be brought 
into legitimate service, AnnabeFs mind is of an objec- 
tive type. Clarets subjective. The bride is clear-headed 
and joyous, untroubled by doubts or anxieties, sociable, 
merry, and without reserve ; her friend is tortuous and 
melancholy, dealing in symbols and conceits, reserved, 
inscrutable, introspective. Lessingham is more inte- 
resting than agreeable ; he is very honest and well- 
meaning, but weak in will and purpose ; we find him 
too passionate to be really generous, and at last, led 
away by his tempestuous emotions, he becomes mali- 
cious and cruel. To work out all this with success 
needed a master^s hand ; Webster delighted in deve- 
loping such fantastic and wayward characters as these. 
Bonville, again, stands as much in contrast to Lessing- 
ham as Annabel does to Clare. He is very virtuous 
and noble, but less subtle of intellect than his friend, 
and capable of the injustice that is the child of im- 
perfect mental sympathy. 

The third act contains a scene, in our estimation, 
finer than any out of the two great tragedies, and 



78 Seventeenth Century Studies 

second to few in them. The quarrel on Calais sands 
between Lessingham and Bonville is one of the most 
complete triumphs of Webster's subtle genius. It bears 
just sufficient likeness to the well-known duel in the 
Devirs Law Case to prove their common paternity, 
but in pathos and stately power it far excels it. The 
occasion is pecuhar. Lessingham is commanded by the 
mysterious Clare to kill his best friend if he would win 
her love, so he induces Bonville on the very day of his 
marriage to come to Calais, where only English duels 
could be fought, to be his second. When they get 
there, no one is in sight, and Lessingham has to ex- 
plain to his astonished and indignant friend that he is 
himself the antagonist. The situation is a most thrill- 
ing one. The long stretch of ribbed and barren sand ; 
the unbroken solitude of sea, shore, and sky ; the two 
men fearlessly standing face to face before they bury the 
love of years in a feud where the passion of anger has no 
place. The only sound in all the wide expanse is the 
long wash " of the cruel and inconstant sea, that beats 
upon this beach." While they prepare to fight for life 
and death, their words, bold and solemn as the dying 
speech of a good man, wake the echoes of that un- 
peopled place. What they say, with what a sad and 
noble compromise they rescue their lives from that 
fratricide, it is not my part to tell. Let the reader 
search out for himself, and store up this strange duel 
in his memory. 

The finale is more happily managed than is usual in 
Webster's plays. In the beginning of the last act a 
general misunderstanding has involved every one in 



John Webster 79 

confusion. The reputation of the excellent Annabel 
has to be cleared, and her father, WoodrofF, defends 
her in a noble little speech. The final quarrel, 
after which all the threads are unravelled, is most 
natural and animated, and on the stage would be 
extremely effective. This little drama would be well 
worthy of reproduction on the boards of one of our 
theatres.^ 

In that high garden of the gods of song where the 
Muses walk among the statues of the dead poets they 
have loved, there is one delicious terrace that looks 
over the western sea. Here, when the grass is still 
dewy, and the shadow of the eastern mountains still 
upon the garden, Melpomene comes daily to lay a 
fresh garland on the bland brows of Shakespeare. All 
the unfamiliar faces of the Elizabethans gaze out of 
the shade of the laurels, reposing in marble after their 
stormy life on earth. But before she reaches the great 
Master, the Muse steps aside to lay vervain on a head 
whose outlines, in the extreme shadow, are quite in- 
visible to us; it is to the author of the Duchess of 
Malfy that she pays this gracious homage, and we 
long to stand where she does, and see what face and 
form, what lips and hair and eyes clothed the godhead 
of this poet of poets. This we shall never see ; the 
laurels will for ever hide this singer*s throat and fore- 
head. The more let us devoutly examine what he has 

1 A reprint of Webster's share in this play, edited by the Hon. S. 
E. Spring-Rice, was issued in 1884 from the private press of the Rev. 
•C. H. Daniel, of Worcester College, Oxford. Mr. Spring-Rice has 
paid me the compliment of adopting my title of Lovers Graduate. 



8o Seventeenth Century Studies 

left behind him, and write on the blank slab that hides 
his dust some such words as these, which some one 
has used regarding him : — 

" His was a soul whose calm intensity 

Glared, shadeless, at the passion-sun that blinds, 
Unblinded, till the storm of song arose ; 
Even as the patient and Promethean sea 
Tosses in sleep, until the vulture-winds 

Swoop down, and tear the breast of its repose ! " 

1874. 



SAMUEL ROWLANDS 

IN an age when the newly-awakened taste for letters 
had suddenly thrown open to men who could wield 
a pen every door that led to the arena of literary pub- 
licity, Samuel Rowlands made less effort than most of 
his contemporaries to gain the plaudits of the cultivated, 
or to secure the garland of lasting fame. His name 
appears in no list of honoured poets in his own genera- 
tion ; in the next, his writings found no editor, and his 
life no biographer. He comes down to us merely as 
a voluble pamphleteer, of whose numerous works some 
are altogether lost, and others, become nearly unique, 
are purchased by the curious at such prices for a single 
copy as the author never made by a whole edition. 
Of the minor masters of the Greek stage, of Ion or of 
lophon, we have plentiful record, though their works 
are gone; but in the case of the lesser stars of the 
Elizabethan galaxy the work of oblivion has been 
reversed — we have their works, but not the record of 
their lives. In no case has history been more per- 
sistent in silence than when summoned to give us 
news of Samuel Rowlands. Of almost every other 
writer we have succeeded in discovering something; 
but of him nothing. We do not know when he was 
born, or when he died, whether he was a scholar of 

8i J. 



82 Seventeenth Century Studies 

either university, whether he had taken orders, or 
whether he had married a wife. It is left to us, there- 
fore, as to those who map the heavens, to draw an 
approximate outhne of his Hfe by the conjunction of 
those works or stars that form his constellation. They 
are very numerous, they extend over a period of thirty 
years, and they give some, but very slight, internal 
evidence of their author^s personality. 

In all probability Samuel Rowlands was born soon 
after 1570. We may roughly conjecture that 1573, 
the year that saw the birth of Donne and of Ben 
Jonson, saw his also. Should this be correct, he was 
from six to eighteen years younger than the five 
famous friends in whose steps he was to walk, with a 
gentler, tamer tread than theirs. When he was about 
ten years old, Lodge, Peele, and Greene began to 
write, and it was not long before Nash and Marlowe 
joined the company of the penners of love-pamphlets. 
These men, united rather by their boisterous friend- 
ship than any innate similarity of genius, were among 
the first professional men of letters in England. Lodge 
and Greene began as Euphuists at the feet of Lyly; 
they were drawn by the example of Nash into the 
practice of satire, and into the compilation of catch- 
penny pamphlets on passing events. They very 
quickly ran through their brief careers, and had already 
died or retired from public life before Rowlands began 
to write. But their influence had been immense ; they 
had inaugurated a new epoch in popular literature; 
and though the main current of such writing pro- 
ceeded to flow in the channel of the drama, they still 



Samuel Rowlands 83 

counted their followers in the younger generation. Of 
these followers Rowlands, and fifteen years later 
Braithwait, were the most important, and to both of 
these authors, entirely neglected for more than two 
centuries, public interest has of late returned. That 
either the one or the other was a writer of much merit, 
or deserved in any strict sense the name of poet, may 
easily and safely be denied, but neither lacks that 
quality of force that renders an author worthy of more 
than mere antiquarian attention. 

Like Drayton, and other secular poets of that age, 
Rowlands commenced his career with a volume of 
devotional pieces. The Betraying of Christy which 
bore the more apt sub-title of Poems on the Passion^ 
appeared in 1598, and went through two editions 
within that year. We have guessed the age of the 
author at twenty-five, and certainly the style of his 
verses gives us no sign of precocity or extreme youth. 
The poems are indeed remarkably smooth, with the 
even grace and monotonous polish of a writer to 
whom the art of verse presents no difficulties and 
contains no surprises. They are composed in an 
heroic stanza of six lines, rhyme royal with the fifth line 
omitted, and this form, one of the simplest that can 
be devised, remained a favourite with Rowlands until 
he ceased to publish. 

But it was not with nerveless paraphrases of the 
New Testament that he was destined to catch the 
popular ear. In 1600 he produced two works which 
greatly extended his reputation, and made him, if 
not famous, at least widely notorious. The first of 



84 Seventeenth Century Studies 

these, entitled A Merry Meetmg^ or ' Tis Merry when 
Knaves Meet, was successfully suppressed by the 
authorities, and has only come down to us in an ex- 
purgated edition of 1609. It was so offensive in its 
personality, so acrid in its satire, that it was ordered 
to be burned publicly, and in the Hall Kitchen of the 
Stationers' Company. A month later the poet hurried 
through the press another collection. The Letting of 
Humour's Blood in the Head Vein, and this has fortu- 
nately survived in at least four copies. It is a very 
creditable production, full of the animation of the time, 
with none of its pedantry, and a little of its genius. 
The greater part of the book is occupied with small 
satirical pieces, called Epigrams, describing, mainly in 
the six-line stanza, those fantastic figures of the day 
which the poets delighted to caricature. These are 
very well written, clear, pointed, and even, never rising 
to the incisive melody of a great poet, but never sink- 
ing below a fairly admirable level, while for the student 
of manners they abound in picturesque detail and 
realistic painting. The following lines from an address 
to the poet's contemporaries, stripped of their antique 
spelling, give a fair notion of the modern tone of the 
book, and its easy elegance : — 

'^ Will you stand spending your invention's treasure 
To teach stage parrots speak for penny pleasure, 
While you yourselves, like music-sounding lutes. 
Fretted and strange, gain them their silken fruits ? 
Leave Cupid's cuts, women's face-flattering praise. 
Love's subject grows too threadbare nowadays. 
Change Venus' swans to write of Vulcan's geese. 
And you shall merit golden pens apiece." 



Samuel Rowlands 85 

The dislike of the theatre here so strongly expressed 
continued to the last, and Rowlands seems never to 
have been tempted to try his skill in the lucrative field 
of the stage. It is not improbable that his facile pen 
and experience in the humours of low life would have 
enabled him to develop a comic talent which might 
have ranged between that of Dekker and that of Hey- 
wood; but he would have missed the tenderness of 
the former, and the flowery fancy of the latter. The 
end of the volume called The Letting of Humour' s Blood 
is composed of satires in the Roman style, in heroic 
couplets. Here again Rowlands shows rather his 
quickness in seizing an idea than his faculty for 
originating one, since the trick of writing these pieces 
had been invented by Lodge in 1595, and had been 
imitated by Hall, Guilpin, and Marston before Row- 
lands adopted it. He is, however, in some respects 
the superior of these preceding writers. In all pro- 
bability he was not, as they were, men of any classic 
learning, and he was seduced by no desire of emulating 
Persius into those harsh and involved constructions 
which make the satires of Donne and Marston the 
wonder of grammarians. 

The early works of Rowlands gave promise of 
much greater attainment than their author ultimately 
achieved. His fourth book, ^Tis Merry when Gossips 
Meet J pubHshed in 1602, is an admirable piece of 
comedy, bright, fresh, and limpid, and composed in a 
style only too dangerously smooth and rapid. It opens 
with a fine tribute to Chaucer, ^' our famous reverend 
English Poet," and proceeds to give a valuable piece 



86 Seventeenth Century Studies 

of contemporary manners in a conversation between a 
gentleman and a bookseller, in prose. The gentleman 
has no taste for new books ; he prefers the old ones. 
He says, ^' Canst help me to all Greene's books in one 
volume ? But I will have them every one, not any 
wanting." The modern book-hunter starts at the idea 
of a volume containing all Greene's works in the 
original quartos; even the bookseller of 1602 finds 
that he has some half-a-dozen lacking. Then the 
gentleman is urged to buy a book of Nash's, but he 
has it already ; at last he is persuaded to buy the very 
poem to which this conversation is a preface, and we 
are interested to learn that he pays sixpence for it, less 
than one-thousandth part of the sum that would be 
asked to-day for a clean copy. 

The poem is in Rowlands' usual six-line stanza, but 
it is singular among his works as being in a dramatic 
form. It is, in fact, a dialogue between a Widow, a 
Wife, a Maid, and a Vintner. The Widow meets the 
Wife, whom she has not seen for a long time, outside 
a tavern, and while they stand talking the Maid goes 
by. The Widow stops her, and vows that they must 
all three drink a glass together before they part. The 
Wife and the Maid object, but their objections are 
overruled by the boisterous joviality of the Widow, 
who drags them into the tavern. They are shown 
upstairs into a private room, and the Vintner brings 
them claret. Over their wine they discuss old times and 
their present fortunes in a very humorous and natural 
way. The Widow is a coarse, good-humoured woman, 
full of animal spirits, and still rebellious with the 



Samuel Rowlands 87 

memory of her red-haired husband, who used her ill ; 
the Wife, on the other hand, praises her husband, an 
easy soul who lets her have her way ; the Maid talks 
very little at first, but as she warms with the wine, she 
describes the sort of husband she means to have. 
Presently they finish the claret, and the Wife and the 
Maid wish to go, but the Widow will not hear of it, 
bidding the Vintner rather burn some sack and fry 
some sausages. Over this feast they linger a long 
while gossiping, till the Maid has burning cheeks and 
the Widow becomes indisputably drunk. She talks so 
broadly that the Vintner^s boy laughs, and then she 
becomes extremely dignified, demanding an apology. 
In the end she patronises the Vintner, and makes 
him drink with them; and when at last her friends 
rise to go, she insists on paying the whole reckoning. 
It will be seen that the poem has no plot, and that 
the contents are very slight ; but the workmanship is 
admirable, and the little realistic touches combine to 
form an interior as warm and full in colour as any 
painted by Brouwer or Ostade. It is one of the best 
studies oi genre we possess in all Elizabethan literature. 
^Tis Merry when Gossips Meet went through at least 
seven editions before the end of the century. 

Simultaneously with this humorous poem, Rowlands 
published, in 1602, a collection of prose stories of 
smart cheating and cozening under the title of Greeners 
Ghost Haunting Coney catchers, adopting this popular 
name to attract public notice. As a catcher of rabbits, 
or conies, trades upon the stupidity of his victims, so 
it was represented by the pamphleteers of the day that 



88 Seventeenth Century Studies 

knaves took advantage of the credulity of simple 
citizens, and hence the popularity of a title that Greene 
had invented, but which found a score of imitators. 
Rowlands' tales are lively, but for us the main interest 
of the book centres in its preface and in its address to 
the reader, in which Rowlands comes forward distinctly 
as a pamphleteer, disclaiming any pretension to learn- 
ing or an ambitious style. From this time forth he 
appears solely as a caterer for the frivolous and casual 
reader, and demands notice rather as a journalist than 
as an author. His little books are what we should 
now term social articles; they answer exactly to the 
" middles " of our best weekly newspapers. 

Our curiosity is excited by the lapses in his com- 
position, and we wonder how such a man subsisted in 
the intervals between the pubHcation of his works. 
His familiarity with the book-trade, and his cunning 
way of adapting his titles and subjects to the exact 
taste of the moment, suggest that he may have found 
employment in one of the booksellers' shops. In this 
connection we turn in hope of confirmation to the 
imprints of his volumes, but in vain. He published 
with a great variety of booksellers, and rarely more 
than twice with the same. From 1600 to 1605 he was, 
however, in business with William White, in Pope's 
Head Alley, near the Exchange, and for ten years his 
tracts were sold by George Loftus, in Bishopsgate 
Street, near the Angel. As Loftus would seem to 
have succeeded White, or to have removed from his 
employment into a separate business, it is within the 
bounds of legitimate speculation to guess that Row- 



Samuel Rowlands 89 

lands spent fifteen of his busiest years in the employ- 
ment of these city booksellers. 

In 1604 he published, under the sensational title of 
Look to Ity or ril Stab You^ a fresh collection of 
satirical characters in verse, in form and substance 
precisely like the epigrams in his Letting of Humour^ s 
Blood. His style had by this time reached its highest 
refinement and purity, without the slightest trace of 
elevation. The character of the Curious Divine forms 
a good example of his fluent and prosaic verse : — 

" Divines, that are together by the ears, 

Puffed up, high-minded, seedsmen of dissension, 
Striking until Christ's seamless garment tears, 
Making the Scripture follow your invention, 
Neglecting that whereon the soul should feed, 
Employed in that whereof souls have no need ; 

" Curious in things you need not stir about, 
Such as concern not matter of salvation, 
Giving offence to them that are without. 

Upon whose weakness you should have compassion, 
Causing the good to grieve, the bad rejoice, — 
Yet you, with Martha, make the worser choice, — 

ril stab you ! " 

From this time forward every year saw one, at least, 
of his facile productions. In 1605 it was HelPs Broke 
Loosej one of the poorest things he ever wrote, a mean 
kind of epic poem in his favourite six-line stanza, on 
the Hfe and death of John of Leyden. In the same 
year he returned to his first love, and published A 
Theatre of Divine Recreation^ a collection of religious 
poems, founded on the Old Testament. This book, 



90 Seventeenth Century Studies 

which was in existence as late as 1812, has dis- 
appeared. 

The best of all Rowlands^ works, from a literary- 
point of view, is the rarest also. A Terrible Battle 
between Time and Death exists only in a single copy, 
which has been bound in such a way that the imprint 
and date are lost. There is little doubt, however, that 
the latter was 1606. The dedication is odd; Rowlands 
inscribes his book to a Mr. George Gaywood, whom 
he does not personally know, but who has shown more 
than fatherly kindness to a friend of the author^s. We 
wonder if the *' friend" may have been the author's 
wife, by a concealment not unprecedented in that age, 
and Mr. Gaywood her godfather or patron. At any 
rate, some singular chain of circumstances seems hinted 
at in this very cryptic dedication. The poem itself 
contains the best things that Rowlands has left behind 
him. It opens in a most solemn and noble strain, 
with a closer echo of the august music of the tragic 
Elizabethans than Rowlands attains anywhere else : — 

" Dread potent Monster, mighty from thy birth, 
Giant of strength against all mortal power, 
God's great Earl Marshal over all the earth. 
Taking account of each man's dying hour, 
Landlord of graves and tombs of marble stones, 
Lord Treasurer of rotten dead men's bones." 

Thus Time addresses Death, whom he has met wander- 
ing over the world on his dread mission. But Death 
cannot stay to talk with him; he has to mow down 
proud kings and tender women, gluttons and atheists 
and swaggering bullies, all who live without God, and 



Samuel Rowlands 9^ 

take no thought of the morrow. Yet Time beguiles 
him to stay awhile, since, without Time, Death has no 
lawful right or power, and so they agree to converse 
together while half the sand runs through the hour- 
glass of Time. Their conversation deals with the 
obvious moralities, the frivolity of man, the solemnity 
of eternity, the various modes in which persons of 
different casts of character meet the advent of death. 
The dialogue is dignified, even where it is most quaint, 
and the reader is reminded of the devotional poetry 
of a later time, sometimes of Herbert, more often of 
Quarles. But Rowlands has not the strength of wing 
needed for these moral flights ; his poem becomes 
tedious and then grotesque. At the close of Timers 
pleasant conversation with Death, they fall out, and 
the latter, who prides himself on his personal beauty, 
is extremely disconcerted at the rudeness with which 
Time compares his arm and hand to a gardener^s rake, 
and his head to a dry empty oil-jar. After these 
amenities the reader prepares for that ** terrible bloody 
battle" promised on the title-page, but he is disap- 
pointed, for the pair make up their quarrel immediately, 
and proceed together to their mortuary labours. 

The year 1607 was one of great literary activity with 
Rowlands. He published no fewer than three books, 
though, singularly enough, we possess the first edition 
of but one of these. A work of 1607, ^^ which the first 
edition has been lost, is Doctor Merryman, a series 
of bright sallies in verse, describing and ridiculing the 
popular affectations or ''humours" of the day. In 
this book a slight change of tone is apparent ; the fun 



92 Seventeenth Century Studies 

becomes broader, the style more liquid, and Rowlands 
reminds us of a writer the very opposite of an ordinary 
Elizabethan, namely, Peter Pindar, and sometimes of 
the younger Colman. That the smartness and voluble 
wit have not entirely evaporated yet accounts for the 
immense popularity enjoyed by such a work as this 
when it was new ; yet such writing can hardly be 
admitted to a place in literature. Another humorous 
volume of 1607, ^^^ London Gossips ^ has absolutely 
disappeared, and the only first edition of that prolific 
year which we still possess is Diogenes'' Lanthorn. 
In 1 591 Lodge had used the name of Diogenes for the 
title of a prose satire, and Rowlands' is but a feeble 
copy of that quaint and witty book. Lodge brings out 
the venom of Diogenes in a dialogue; Rowlands makes 
him soliloquise, and after his cynical monologue in the 
streets of Athens, abruptly drops his hero, and closes 
the volume with a series of fables, put into easy popular 
verse with his customary facility. 

In The Famous History of Guy^ Earl of Warwick^ 
he showed very plainly the limitation of his powers. 
This poem, printed in 1608, as if in heroic couplets, 
but really in the six-line stanza, was spoken of by Mr. 
Utterson as a travesty, intended to bring chivalric 
literature into ridicule ; but this was entirely a mistake. 
Nothing could be more serious than the twelve heavy 
cantos of Rowlands' tedious romance, which seems to 
have been written in imitation or emulation of Fairfax's 
TassOy published a few years earlier. 

The year 1608 also saw the publication of Humour's 
Looking-GlasSy a collection precisely similar in char- 



Samuel Rowlands 93 

acter to The Letting of Humour's Blood. As before, we 
find no spark of poetic fancy, but plenty of rhetorical 
skill, a picturesque and direct style, and much descrip- 
tive verve. The boastful traveller was a frequent and 
favourite subject with the poets of Elizabeth ; he was 
a product of their showy and grandiloquent age, and, 
while they laughed at his bravado, they were half in- 
clined to like him for his impudence. But not one of 
them has drawn his portrait better than Rowlands has 
in Humouf^s Looking-Glass : — 

" Come, my brave Gallant, come, uncase, uncase ! 
Ne'er shall oblivion your great acts deface : 
He has been there where never man came yet, 
An unknown country, ay, Til warrant it \ 
Whence he could ballast a good ship in hold 
With rubies, sapphires, diamonds and gold, 
Great orient pearls esteemed no more than notes, 
Sold by the peck, as chandlers measure oats ; 
I marvel, then, we have no trade from thence ? 
* Oh ! 'tis too far, it will not bear expense.' 
'Twere far, indeed, a good way from our main, 
If charges eat up such excessive gain. 

I heard him swear that he, — 'twas in his mirth, — 
Had been in all the corners of the earth ; 
Let all his wonders be together stitched ; 
He threw the bar that great Alcides pitched ; 
Yet he that saw the Ocean's farthest strands, 
You pose him if you ask where Dover stands." 

It would be difficult to quote a more favourable example 
of Rowlands^ versification, and there are couplets in 
this passage which Waller would not have disdained 
to use. The instances of such smoothness of heroic 
verse early in the century are commoner than has 



94 Seventeenth Century Studies 

been supposed, although they were rarely sustained. 
This, as well as all other branches of the universal art 
of poetry, was understood by the great Elizabethan 
masters; and if they did not frequently employ it^ 
it was because they left to such humbler writers 
as Rowlands an instrument incapable of those noble 
and audacious harmonies on which they chiefly prided 
themselves. 

In 1609, unless I am wrong in my conjecture that 
the Whole Crew of Kind Gossips of that year was but 
a new edition of the Six London Gossips of 1607, 
Rowlands confined himself to the reprinting of several 
of his tracts, and to this fact we owe the possession 
of one or two of the earlier books already described. 
His first book of satires, which had been condemned 
to be burned in 1600, he now brought out anew, under 
the title of The Knave of Clubsy and as in this later 
form it contains nothing which could reasonably give 
ofience, it is to be supposed that the peccant passages 
had been expunged. It is not a very clever perfor- 
mance, rather dull and ribald, and inferior in vivacity 
to the fables at the close of Diogenes^ Lanthorn. 

The Whole Crew of Kind Gossips is a fairly divert- 
ing description of six citizens' wives, who meet in 
council to denounce their husbands, the latter presently 
entering to address the public, and turn the tables on 
their wives. This humble sort of Ecclesiazusce has 
nothing very Aristophanic about it ; it is, indeed, one 
of Rowlands' failures. Seldom has he secured a 
subject so well suited to his genius for low humour, 
and never has he more completely missed the point of 



Samuel Rowlands 95 

the situation. The writing shows traces of rapid and 
careless composition, the speeches of the wives are 
wanting in variety and character, and those of the 
husbands are dragged on without rhyme or reason, 
unannounced and unexplained. The language, how- 
ever, is admirably clear and modern. It is to be 
feared that our poet had fallen upon troublous days, 
for his works about this time are the merest catch- 
penny things, thrown off without care or self-respect. 
Martin Mark-all, his contribution to 1610, is an arrant 
piece of book-making. It professes to be an historical 
account of the rise and progress of roguery up to the 
reign of Henry VIII. , as stated to the Bellman of 
London by the Beadle of Bridewell. It has this special 
interest to modern students, that it contains a very 
curious dictionary of canting terms, preceding by 
more than half a century that in the English Rogue. 
Moreover, buried in a great deal of trash, it includes 
some valuable biographical notes about famous high- 
waymen and thieves of the sixteenth century. It is 
entirely in prose, except some queer Gipsy songs. 
The wrath of Dekker, it is supposed, was roused by 
a charge of plagiarism brought against some author 
unknown in this book, and he appears to attack 
Rowlands in his Lanthorn and Candlelight. This very 
slight encounter is the only incident that associates 
Rowlands with any of his contemporaries, and even 
this might fairly be disputed on the ground of dates. 

The success of the Knave of Clubs induced Rowlands 
to repeat his venture with the Knave of Hearts in 
16 1 2, and The Knaves of Spades and Diamonds in 



96 Seventeenth Century Studies 

1613. These works are in no way to be distinguished 
from those that preceded them; their author was 
perhaps growing a Httle coarser, a Httle heavier, but 
for the rest there is the same low and trivial view of 
life, the same easy satire, the same fluency and lucidity 
of language. The increasing heaviness of his style is 
still more plainly seen in his next work, A Foofs Bolt 
is soon Shoty though this is far from being the worst of 
his productions. In this volume, sure of a large body 
of readers, he disdains the artifice of a dedication, and 
simply inscribes his poem ^*To Rash Judgment, Tom 
Fool and his fellows." It consists of a series of tales, 
in heroic verse, concerning the practical blunders of 
all sorts of foolish people, and these stories happen to 
be particularly rich in those personal details that make 
the works of Rowlands so valuable to antiquaries. 

By far the best written and most important of his late 
works is the Melancholy Knight of 1 6 1 5. The title-page 
of this pamphlet is adorned by a most curious wood- 
cut, faithfully rendered in facsimile in the reprint of 
the Hunterian Club. This represents a gentleman, 
apparelled in the richest gala-dress of that period, 
with his hat pulled over his eyes, and his head deeply 
sunken in his capacious ruff of point-lace. His arms 
are folded before him, and he lounges on, lost in melan- 
choly reverie. It is he who is supposed to indite the 
poems. He says : 

" I have a melancholy skull, 
That's almost fractured, 'tis so full ! 
To ease the same these lines I write ; 
Tobacco, boy ! a pipe ! some light ! ' 



Samuel Rowlands 97 

His reflections upon the follies and knaveries of the 
age, its vices, its affectations, and its impertinencies, 
are full of bright and delightful reading, but especially 
when it is found that the Knight is a bookworm, 
and spends his time in devouring old folio romances 
and chivalric tales '* of ladies fair and lovely knights,* 
like any Don Quixote; and most of all when he 
ventures to recite a very touching ballad of his own 
about Sir Eglamour and the Dragon. No doubt the 
fame of Cervantes' masterpiece, published just ten 
years before, had reached the English pamphleteer, 
and he had certainly seen The Knight of the Burn- 
ing Pestle performed in 1611. Rowlands was never 
original, but he was very quick in adopting a new 
idea. In some of the descriptions of oddity in the 
Melancholy Knight he show^s a greater richness in 
expression than in his early works. He had probably 
read the satires of Donne. 

The remaining works of Rowlands need not detain 
us very long. In 16 17 he published a poem called 
The Bridey but it is lost. In 161 8 he brought out A 
Sacred Memory of the Miracles of Christy remarkable 
only for the preface, in which he exhorts '* all faithful 
Christians," with such confident unction as to suggest 
that he may possibly by this time have found a sphere 
for his energies within the Church of England. In 
the poems themselves there is nothing important ; they 
present all the features of conventionality and effete 
piety which are to be met with in English poems on 
sacred narrative subjects before the days of Quarles. 
With The Night Raven^ in 1620, and Good News and 

G 



98 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Bad News^ in 1622, the long series of Rowlands' 
humoristic studies closes. These two books, exactly 
like one another in style, consist of the usual chain of 
stories, less ably told than before, but still occupied, 
as ever, with knavery and simplicity, the endless joke, 
now repeated to satiety, at the ease with which dul- 
ness is gulled by roguery. According to all probable 
computation, Rowlands by this time was at least fifty 
years of age ; and after producing this sort of homely 
poetry for more than a quarter of a century, he 
possibly found that the public he once addressed had 
abandoned him. At all events. Good News and Bad 
News is the last of his comic writings. 

Six years later there appeared a little duodecimo 
volume of sacred verse and prose, entitled HeaverHs 
Glory J Seek it; EartKs Vanity ^ Fly it ; HelVs Horror y 
Fear it. Under this affected title a writer who signs 
himself Samuel Rowland issues a collection of suffi- 
ciently tedious homilies, interspersed with divine poems. 
That this book was written by Samuel Rowlands has 
been freely affirmed, and as freely denied ; but I do 
not think that any doubt on the subject can remain on 
the mind of any one who carefully reads it. The prose 
pages, it is true, have all the dogged insipidity and 
absolute colourlessness of style which mark the minor 
theological literature of the seventeenth century, but 
the poems are not so undecipherable. They are 
printed in a delusive way, so as to seem to be in a 
short ballad metre; but they are really, in all cases, 
composed in that identical six-line stanza which Row- 
lands affected throughout his life. Nor is there more 



Samuel Rowlands 99 

similarity to his authentic poems in the form than in 
the style of these religious pieces. There is precisely 
the same fluid versification, the same easy and sensible 
mediocrity, and the same want of elevation and origin- 
ality. At the end of this hortatory work there is found 
a collection of Prayers for use in Godly Families, and 
appended to these latter a collection of poems entitled 
Co'inmon Calls, Cries and Sounds of the Bellman^ con- 
sisting of religious posies and epigrams, very poorly 
written, but still distinctly recognisable as the work of 
Rowlands. I do not think there can be the slightest 
doubt that this miscellaneous volume is rightly included 
among his veritable works. 

From this year (1628) he passes out of our sight, 
having kept the booksellers busily engaged for exactly 
thirty years. His books continued to find a sale for 
another half-century, and were reprinted at least as 
late as 1675. But they were considered as scarcely 
above the rank of chapbooks, and Rowlands is in- 
cluded among the English poets in not one of the lists 
of contemporary or former authors. In 1630 he wrote 
a few verses of congratulation to his loving friend John 
Taylor, the Water Poet, and in earlier life he had paid 
the same compUment to two still more obscure writers. 
In 161 2, W. Parkes, of whom absolutely nothing is 
known, quoted a short poem by Rowlands in his 
Curtain- Drawer of the World. Such, and such 
alone, are the minute points of connection with his 
contemporaries which the most patient scholarship has 
succeeded in discovering, and they show a literary 
isolation which would be astounding in so fertile an 



loo Seventeenth Century Studies 

author if we were not to consider the undignified and 
ephemeral nature of Rowlands' writings, which the 
passage of time has made interesting to us, but which 
to his cultivated contemporaries must have scarcely 
seemed to belong to literature at all. 

In an age when newspapers were unknown and 
when poetry was still the favourite channel for popular 
thought, such pamphlets as those of Samuel Rowlands 
formed the chief intellectual pabulum of the apprentice 
and of his master's wife, of the city shopkeeper and of 
his less genteel customers. When we consider the 
class addressed, and the general license of those times, 
we shall be rather inclined to admire the reticence of 
the author than to blame his occasional coarseness. 
Rowlands is never immoral, he is rarely indecent ; his 
attitude towards vice of all sorts is rather indifferent, 
and he assumes the judicial air of a satirist with 
small success. He has neither the integrity nor the 
savagery that is required to write satire; he neither 
indulges in the sensual rage of Donne, nor the clerical 
indignation of Hall ; he is always too much amused 
at vice to be thoroughly angry with it. His favourite 
subject of contemplation is a sharper; to his essentially 
bourgeois mind nothing seems so irresistibly funny as 
the trick by which a shrewd rascal becomes possessed 
of the purse or the good name of an honest fool ; and 
no doubt it was this that peculiarly endeared his muse 
to the apprentice and to the serving-maid. 

As a purely literary figure Rowlands has little im- 
portance save what he owes to those details which 
were commonplace in his own time, but which are of 



Samuel Rowlands loi 

antiquarian importance to us. Yet however accidental 
the merit may be, we cannot refuse to him the praise 
of having made the London of Shakespeare more vivid 
to us than almost any other author has done. In 
his earlier works, and especially in his ^Tis Merry 
when Gossips Meet, he has displayed the existence 
in him of a comic vein which he neglected to work, 
but which would have assured him a brilliant success 
if he had had the happy thought of writing for the 
stage. In comedy those bright and facile qualities of 
style which are wasted in the frivolous repetitions of 
his later tales and satires, might have ripened into 
a veritable dramatic talent. As it is, he is a kind 
of small non-political Defoe, a pamphleteer in verse 
whose talents were never put into exercise except when 
their possessor was pressed for means, and a poet of 
considerable talent without one spark or glimmer of 
genius. 
1880. 



In 1880 I had the privilege of editing for the first 
time the complete works of Rowlands, in three 
volumes, for the Hunterian Club. At that time my 
attention had not been drawn to a quarto pamphlet 
existing in a unique example in the library of Mr. 
Henry Huth. This was the poem of Ave Ccesar : 
God Save the King, an address of welcome to James 
I., printed in 1603, but not entered at Stationers' Hall. 
Although this tract is anonymous, I am convinced that 
it was written by Samuel Rowlands, and in 1888 the 



I02 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Hunterian Club was persuaded to issue a separate 
reprint of it. There is inserted in the text of the 
original an elegy on Queen Elizabeth, signed S. R., 
but the whole is obviously by the same hand. The 
poem was sold by George Loftus, whom we have seen 
to have acted as Rowlands' publisher at that date, and, 
in short, both internal and external evidence unite in 
pointing to his certain authorship. 



CAPTAIN DOVER'S COTSWOLD 
GAMES 

IN the extreme north of Gloucestershire there lies a 
district which, even now, in these hurrying days 
when the romance of geography has almost disap- 
peared, preserves a certain isolation of speech and 
custom. The Cotswold Hills, running north-west 
through the length of the county from one Avon to 
another, culminate in their broadest and loftiest form 
just as they are about to disappear in the great central 
plain. The elevated plateau they form is bounded on 
one side by the Stour and the Vale of Evesham, on the 
other by the Evenlode and the Windrush — rivers of 
melodious name that hurry past Woodstock and past 
Witney to feed the waters of the still crystal Thames. 
The inhabitants of the Cotswold, if we may believe the 
late Mr. R. W. Huntley, who employed his immense 
experience of the district in forming a glossary of the 
dialect, still speak an idiom so full of pure Saxon 
forms that an acquaintance with their daily speech 
greatly facilitates the study of old Robert of Gloucester, 
many passages in whose long-winded chronicle are to 
be recognised as good Cotswold of to-day. Even now 
no railway traverses a district which is one of the 

most isolated in England, though near the heart of 

103 



I04 Seventeenth Century Studies 

our populous country. From time immemorial the 
rounded hills and open wolds of this grassy desolation 
were perceived to be specially adapted for athletic 
and public games. On such an expanse of upland a 
vast concourse of persons might be massed without 
confusion and without disturbance to public business. 
It is not certain when first Cotswold became celebrated 
for its public sports ; but certainly in the middle of the 
sixteenth century we find John Heywood, the epi- 
grammatist, talking familiarly of one who was as fierce 
'* as a lion of Cotswold/' and it is understood that this 
allusion is to the leonine youths who fought and raced 
in the fine bracing air of North Gloucestershire. But, 
however this may be, in the early manhood of Shake- 
speare these irregular sports were publicly recognised 
and formulated in a very curious way ; and this for- 
gotten chapter in old English life provides a curious 
little passage in the history of seventeenth century 
poetry. 

Captain Robert Dover, born in Norfolk towards the 
end of the sixteenth century, was, at the time of the 
accession of James I., an attorney at Barton-on-the- 
Heath in Warwickshire. It is amusing to consider 
that he was within an easy walk of Stratford, but not 
very instructive, since there is not the slightest reason 
to suppose that Shakespeare ever took advantage of 
the fact to visit his neighbour. This is, perhaps, un- 
fortunate ; for Dover was a man of charming presence, 
full of those qualities which attract the friendship of 
great minds — easy and genial, stirring, yet without 
ambition. There exists in the British Museum a 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 105 

unique copy of verses in his honour, which, after 
celebrating the virtues of — 

" Dover, that his knowledge not employs 
To increase his neighbours' quarrels but their joys," 

adds, in a prose note, *' he was bred an attorney, who 
never tried but two causes, always made up the differ- 
ence." All the contemporary notices of him agree in 
giving him credit for a generous and public spirit and 
great personal geniality. We seem to see before us, 
in contemplating him, a fine type of the manly English 
burgher of the period, an independent but loyal subject, 
ready to take his own part, but easily convinced and 
appeased, a stalwart person coloured with the brisk 
air of the wolds, nimble in all physical exercises, and 
most at home in the saddle. It would seem that he 
possessed a fortune at least sufficient to allow him to 
use his legal experience simply for the benefit of his 
townsfolk, and that he had plenty of leisure for the 
out-of-door employments that he loved. We do not 
know whether his revival of the Cotswold Games pre- 
ceded or followed his change of residence, but it seems 
certain that early in the seventeenth century he left 
Barton and settled at ** Wickham," by which is probably 
meant Winchcombe. He seems to have built himself 
a house at Stanway, near the latter town, in the heart 
of Cotswold, and here he lived and here he died. 

We all know that no sooner had James ascended the 
vacant throne of Elizabeth than Puritans of every type, 
depending upon the new king^s Presbyterian ante- 
cedents, buzzed round him demanding every species 



io6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

of privilege. We know also that the wily serpent 
turned a deaf ear to all their charming. A few 
trumpery concessions from the House of Commons 
were all they obtained, and these were made the 
excuse for granting no more. It became clear to James 
that kingly prerogative, and his other darling doctrines, 
ran much less fear of opposition from easy-going 
gentlemen loyal to the Establishment than from feverish 
devotees of religious fanaticism. The comfortable 
classes were on the side of the King, and though him- 
self so neurotic and morbid, he was a mighty hunter, 
and always prepared to encourage genial enjoyments 
that helped to prop up royalism and the English 
Church. It is not likely that Captain Robert Dover 
entered at all into the stirring politics of the hour; 
he was not the man to perceive the budding liberty 
of England under the harsh husk of a truculent Puri- 
tanism. But he disliked, in the true spirit of a cheer- 
ful English gentleman, the fretful suspicion of athletic 
sports which has always been a symptom of a gravely 
theological habit of mind, and he determined to have 
none of it in the Cotswold. 

Anthony a Wood, engaged long afterwards in the 
tiresome biography of Clement Barksdale, turned aside 
to gossip with his readers about a much more enter- 
taining Cotswold personage; and it is to this happy 
accident that we learn what follows. Dover deter- 
mined to give an official character to the games he 
proposed to celebrate, and consequently, about the 
year 1604 we may conjecture, he obtained leave from 
the King to select a place on the Cotswold Hills on 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 107 

which to act these sports. The spot he ultimately 
fixed upon was some distance eastward from his house 
at Stanway, and close to Chipping Campden, a little 
Italianated borough, now quite decayed, that lies on the 
open country-side almost midway between Evesham 
and Stow-in-the-Wold. From the scene of the games 
a brook runs through Campden into the Stour, and so 
at last into the Avon a mile below Stratford. Here on 
the wide downs, around a little acclivity that has ever 
since borne the title of Dover^s Hill, the genial Captain 
inaugurated his sports in solemn state. 

There were other places celebrated for public races 
and games in the reign of Elizabeth. Young sparks 
from Cambridge, with a taste for horseflesh, divided 
their patronage between Royston and Newmarket ; at 
Brackley, in Northamptonshire, and at Banstead, in 
Surrey, there were public games, famous in their kind 
and day; on Salisbury Plain sports had long been 
instituted. But Captain Dover determined that the 
fame of all these should be as nothing beside the glory 
of Cotswold. In this scheme he received practical 
help from a romantic friend at court. Endymion 
Porter, afterwards Groom of the Bed-Chamber to his 
Majesty Charles L, was one of those successful men 
of the world, who, with a taste for art and letters, are 
conscious of being themselves without the power to 
excel; and who give themselves the pleasure, not 
being the rose, of cultivating and patronising that 
flower wherever they have the good fortune to find it. 
Endymion Porter enjoyed the title of *' Patron of 
Poets," and by his uniform good nature went far to 



io8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

deserve it. He found them positions, honours, gifts, 
and they in return immortalised him in encomiums and 
pareneticons, where the known passion of the Moon for 
an individual of his name was always ingeniously and 
monotonously dwelt upon. Porter was precisely the 
person most fitted to help Dover in his games, and we 
find that he entered into the scheme with alacrity. 

It is not stated, but we may well imagine, that it 
was the florid fancy of Endymion which suggested 
what would hardly have occurred to plain Captain 
Dover, that the games should be dubbed *^ Olympick," 
and an antique dignity to be lent to the trials of skill 
upon Cotswold. Whoever it was to whom the hint 
was due, it was extremely successful. The faded 
humanism of the taste of the day was charmed to 
think that England was to possess its classic play- 
ground for heroes, with Stour for its Alpheus and 
little Chipping Campden for its Pisa. It gave literary 
importance to the proceedings, and in the course 
of time — as the poetasters strove to outdo one an- 
other — honest Captain Dover became finally styled, by 
the most gushing of them all, *'the great Inventor 
and Champion of the English Olympicks, Pythycks, 
Nemicks, and Isthmicks." These be brave words for 
a little merriment in Whitsun-week, but the poets must 
always be allowed their grain of salt. It is rather to 
be wondered at that no pedantic rhymster of them all 
remembered the special patronage of '^Pythycks" by 
Phoebus Apollo, or 

" Prima Jovi magno celebrantur Olympia Pisae, 
Parnassus Clario sacravit Pythia Phoebo," 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 109 

hexameters in which Ausonius lifted up a voice worthy 
of their own Alabaster. 

Endymion Porter was himself a native of Gloucester- 
shire, and he carried his interest in Dover so far as 
to beg for him some cast-off robes of the King^s, with 
the royal hat, feather, and ruff, in which to open the 
ceremonies with great grace and dignity. A contem- 
porary print gives us a rough picture of the brave 
Captain thus adorned, his plump person arrayed in 
what seems to be a slashed satin doublet, and with 
the plumes of borrowed majesty in a wide-brimmed 
Cavalier hat. On the hill that bore his name there was 
set up a rather grotesque erection known as Dover 
Castle, a portable fortress provided with ordnance and 
artillery, and turning, apparently, on a huge pivot. It 
had a little portcullis and two side bastions, each bastion 
provided with two real guns, which fired away at proper 
intervals to keep up the flagging spirit of the athletes. 
These ^* cannons roaring on the wold, which from thy 
castle rattle to the skies," impressed the contemporary 
imagination very much, and Dover was playfully ex- 
horted to protect Cotswold against the King's enemies. 

It was at Whitsuntide that the gentry assembled at 
Campden to be present at the Cotswold revels. A 
yellow flag was unfurled on the battlements of the 
portable castle, and a bugle was blown to summon the 
quality to the games. Captain Dover himself rode out 
on his palfrey to survey the scene, wearing a yellow 
favour in his hunting-cap. He seems to have rivalled 
the Chinese in his partiality for the colour yellow. At 
the foot of the hill and along the courses there were 



no Seventeenth Century Studies 

arranged tents, where food and drink were served, and 
where pubHc contests at chess were fought out. There 
is some discrepancy in the accounts of the order of 
the sports; there was, perhaps no very strict arrange- 
ment maintained from year to year. According to a 
certain Robert Griffin, however, it was usual, after the 
bugle had blown, to open the ceremonies with horse- 
racing. The country-side outdid itself in adorning the 
animals which were to run with ribands and flowers. 
A poet who met such a palfrey going to be run at Cots- 
wold, declared that if Europa had seen him so gar- 
landed and pranked, she would never have cast eyes 
upon the Bull. The racecourse was some miles long, 
and remained in existence until our own time, when 
it was ploughed up by order of Lord Harrowby. 

The horse-racing was not so original a sport as what 
followed next, the coursing of ** silver- footed grey- 
hounds." For this pastime Cotswold became specially 
famous, and it received the honour of mention from 
Shakespeare. In the very opening scene of The 
Merry Wives of Windsor^ Slander says to Page, 
'* How does your fallow greyhound, sir ? I heard say 
he was outrun on Cotsall." The phrase, *'I heard 
say he was outrun ^^'^ can obviously only refer to a 
competitive coursing, in which Pagers greyhound failed 
to win the first prize. It is remarkable that this pas- 
sage does not occur in the quartos, and rests on the 
authority of the first folio ; but it would be very rash 
to argue from this fact, as has been done, however, 
that the Cotswold games began between 1619 and 
1623. There can be no doubt that at the latter date 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games in 

they had the notoriety which follows twenty years of 
success. It was made a great point by the humane 
Dover that not the killing of the hare, but the winning 
of the prize, should be the aim men set before them in 
competing. He desired to supersede hunting as much 
as possible by instituting these games of skill. 

The next exercise was so curious and so character- 
istic of the times that I must give leave to the above- 
named Robert Griffin to describe it in his own words : — 

" This done, a virgin crew of matchless choice 
Nimbly set forth, attended with a noise 
Of music sweet, excelling that of spheres, 
Whose well-kept diapason ravished their's," 

meaning the spheres', 

" Of all that's sensitive. These nymphs advance 
Themselves with such a comely grace to dance, 
Each with her gallant paired, that all who see 
Their cunning motion and agility 
Are struck with admiration." 

We imagine such a classic dance of loose-robed girls, 
girdled and garlanded with flowers, as Herrick was so 
fond of fancying, but the engraving to which we have 
referred destroys these fair illusions. There are no 
soft outlines of drapery, such as the pupils of Raffaelle 
loved — nothing antique or pseudo-antique. Three 
substantial nymphs are represented dancing conscien- 
tiously a country dance, in stiff gowns of unmistakable 
print, rather high in the waist, and adorned by nothing 
more fantastic than a large white apron and a ruff. 
Their tresses may be luxuriant, but they are modestly 
concealed beneath smooth muslin caps. The sweet 



112 Seventeenth Century Studies 

music, excelling the diapason of the spheres, proceeds 
from a person seated on the ground, who vigorously 
blows the bagpipes. The gallants are not seen, the 
particular dance being apparently a pas seulj under- 
taken by each girl in competition with the others. 

When the virgins had finished their elegant pastime, 
the character of the sports became more general. In 
one part of the course the indispensable quintain was 
put up, in one of its many forms. It is curious that 
what was at that time the most characteristic and uni- 
versal English game should now require explanation ; 
but quintain died in the days of the Commonwealth, 
never to revive. The essence of the sport was to run 
a tilt against an object so balanced, that if you failed to 
hit it at the exact point, some punishment or other fell 
upon you. The simple childish form of the game was 
a tub of water poised in such a way that if the cower- 
ing naked schoolboy who attacked it did not manage 
to strike it in the centre, it gave him a sudden douche 
of the most depressing kind. The most elaborate 
form was an armed figure, turning on a pivot, against 
which a man rode with a lance, and which, in case he 
failed to hit a certain mark on the forehead of the 
figure, swung round and banged him behind with a 
swinging bag of sand. Between these extremes, there 
existed many varieties of quintain, all of them rather 
violent specimens of good old English horse-play; 
Strutt^s Sports and Pastimes may be referred to for 
further particulars. 

Another game in favour at Cotswold was balloon, 
a kind of hand-ball played with a large leather ball 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 113 

like the modern football, driven through the air from 
person to person, struck by a bracer of wood, fastened 
round the hand and wrist for protection, a game still 
to be seen played by French boys in the gardens of 
the Tuileries. In another part of the ground cudgel- 
players strove to break in one another's heads. Men 
ran races, variously bound or handicapped; others 
were wrestling, leaping, casting the sledge-hammer, 
throwing the bar. Everywhere athletic exercises of 
all sorts were encouraged and developed, and all under 
the personal guidance of Captain Robert Dover. Prizes 
were abundantly given, to the number, it would seem, 
of five hundred, since it is recorded that so many gen- 
tlemen carried about with them for a twelvemonth 
the Dover favour of yellow. 

For nearly forty years these games were held every 
year in Whitsun-week, and at the same place, till they 
became more famous than any sports of a similar kind 
held elsewhere. The gentry crowded to them in a 
vast concourse from a radius of sixty miles. Yet so 
ephemeral is the memory of these events, that we 
should know nothing about them but a faint rumour, 
and absolutely nothing about their founder, if it 
had not been for Captain Dover's personal charm of 
character and his friendships with a variety of literary 
men. In 1636 there was published a little volume 
of verse, entitled Annalia Dubrensia^ or Celebration 
of Captain Robert Dover's Cotswold Games. This is 
one of the rarest books of that period, and was long 
practically inaccessible to students. The Rev. A. B. 
Grosart, whose zeal for our early literature is un- 

H 



114 Seventeenth Century Studies 

bounded, has increased the heavy debt which lovers 
of old English poetry already owe him, by reprinting 
for a select number of subscribers this fascinating little 
book, thereby preserving it from all chance of destruc- 
tion. It is adorned with the rude frontispiece to which 
I have referred. At the top of this woodcut we see 
Dover Castle, with two of its cannon in the act of 
'' rattling to the skies ; " on the left of this the virgins 
are dancing, while to the right cudgel-playing, leaping, 
and wrestling are represented. Below this are the 
tents, and a square plaque^ which I take to be a fac- 
simile of Dover's yellow favour. In the centre of the 
cut, persons of quality are feasting at a long table. 
Then follow the horse-racing and the coursing, while the 
foreground is occupied by Dover himself on his palfrey, 
in all his borrowed glory, with some men throwing the 
bar on his left, and the sledge-hammer on his right. 

The letterpress of the volume has a mournful, half- 
posthumous air. It was published a little too late, and 
when the poets sing the glories of the games, we are 
incHned to murmur ^' Ichabod.'^ For the merry days of 
royalism were over, and in the neighbouring county of 
Buckinghamshire, a sturdy gentleman, Mr. Hampden, 
was refusing that ship-money upon which rested so 
vast a fabric in the future. King Charles had played 
his game of quintain; he had tilted recklessly and 
missed, and now the creaking engine of the State was 
swinging round to smite him ignominiously. The days 
of hock-feasts and barley-breaks were over, and in the 
very heart of the growing uneasiness and discontent 
here appeared this cheerful little book of eulogies^ 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 115 

manifestly born after due time. But in another sense 
it was late in appearing. It was the work, as far 
as we can judge by those writers whose names are 
familiar to us, of poets of the olden school, now 
all dead or aged. To describe its contents more 
exactly, the Annalia Dubrensia is an anthology of 
original verses by thirty-three hands, all to the 
honour and glory of Captain Robert Dover. In the 
list of authors we find some names of the highest 
eminence — Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Thomas 
Randolph, and Thomas Heywood ; names of accom- 
plished writers such as Owen Feltham, William Basse, 
Sir John Mennis, and Shackerley Marmion. One 
poem is anonymous, and another signed by initials; 
the others bear the names of unknown persons mani- 
festly amateurs. The whole is edited by a Mr. Mat. 
Walbancke. 

Drayton leads off with some thirty lines of good 
sound verse, '*to his noble friend Mr. Robert Dover 
on his brave annual assemblies upon Cotswold." He 
congratulates England on having succeeded to the 
glories of Greece, compares the Cotswold with the 
Olympic Games, and foretells that coming generations 
will count their years from the former, just as Greece, 

" Nurse of all arts and of all famous men," 

counted hers by Olympiads. It is plain that these 
lines had long circulated in MS. ; several of the other 
writers refer to them, and besides, when the Annalia 
Dubrensia was published, Drayton had been at rest in 
Poet's Corner for nearly five years. It was natural 



ii6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

that Dover should be specially delighted at a tribute 
from the heroic muse of Drayton. The latter had not 
been a popular or successful poet, in a worldly sense, 
but the force and dignity of his writing, and his 
position a little aloof from and above the warring of 
the wits, gave him a sort of pre-eminence. The sweet 
and courtly Daniel had held the same kind of poetical 
kingship, but he had died soon, and Drayton seems 
to have succeeded him in a sort of non-official laureate- 
ship. From the character of the verse in this little 
eulogy, I hazard the conjecture that it was written 
in the last period of his life, when he was the honoured 
guest of the Earl of Dorset. 

A still greater man than Drayton contributes a brief 
poem to this charming little " Amulet" or " Keepsake." 
If we recollect the circumstances of Ben Jonson in the 
year 1636, the melancholy significance of these bluff 
lines, evidently written years before, will be very 
apparent. He had ceased in 1636 to care about 
Captain Dover or his Olympic games, and indeed a 
hard life was fast drawing to its painful close. Stricken 
with palsy, he had long struggled against poverty 
by the painful composition of entertainments and 
pageants, but now even his last labour of love. The 
Sad Shepherd^ dropped unfinished from his hands. 
In a few months England was to pause in the midst 
of her civic troubles to discuss the news of the great 
poet's death. Jonson's lines are brief, and have an 
air of compulsion. Perhaps Captain Dover teased the 
old man for a contribution to his ''garland;" at all 
events, the verses, the last production of the author's 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 117 

printed in his lifetime, have more growHng than singing 
in them. He decHnes in the outset to follow Drayton 
in his airy parallels between Chipping Campden and 
Pisa in Elis : — 

" I cannot bring my Muse to drop vies '^ 
'Twixt Cotswold and the Olympic exercise," 

but he hopes that Church and State may flourish and 
be advanced, in spite of hypocrites, and that Dover 
may have a share in this good work. 

By far the most admirable poem in the collection, 
from a literary point of view, is Randolph's contribu- 
tion. This also had the melancholy fortune to be 
posthumous, for the poet, cut off by we know not 
what accident in the flower of his youth, had died at 
the house of a friend a few months before. It was a 
deplorable loss to English literature. The stars must 
have erred in casting his horoscope, for Randolph had 
none of that precocious ripeness which seems so often 
to be the presage of, and the consolation for, an early 
death. His genius, which had something resolute and 
sturdy about it, was one that would certainly have 
raised him, at least, to an honourable place in the 
second rank of poets. His six plays and his thin 
collection of lyrics were but the infant motions of a 
wing that meant to strike hard and wide into the 
empyrean of poetry. 

* Great difficulty has been found in the measure and meaning of this 
line. To me there seems to be none if we take " Muse " to be a dis- 
syllable, as *' statue " was a trisyllable (in Habington and elsewhere), 
and if we understand ** vie " to be a noun equivalent to " comparison." 



ii8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

There is nothing hectic or hysterical in what remains 
to us of Randolph ; no attractive weakness or dolphin 
colour of approaching death. Had he lived he might 
have bridged over, with a strong popular poetry, the 
abyss between the old romantic and the new didactic 
schools, for he had a little of the spirit of each. As it 
is, he holds a better place in English literature than 
Dryden, or Gray, or Massinger would have held had 
they died before they were thirty. His ^^ Eclogue on 
the Palilia and noble Assemblies revived on Cotswold 
Hills'' is charming. Two shepherds, Collen and 
Thenot, converse about the degeneracy of the English 
swains. Collen is exceedingly afQicted to find his 
compeers so boorish, and Thenot replies that it cannot 
be for want of ability, since nowhere in the world can 
you find men so vast in stature, so sinewy and so 
supple, as the swains of England. Collen explains 
that the Puritans are to blame for this boorishness. 
In early times there were joyous games, in which the 
English athletes contended and grew skilful and grace- 
ful. In those days, he continues, in a charming vein 
of pastoral — 

" Early in May up got the jolly rout, 
Called by the lark, and spread the fields about ; 
One, for to breathe himself, would coursing be 
From this same beech to yonder mulberry ; 
A second leaped, his supple nerves to try ; 
A third was practising his melody ; 
This a new foot was jigging ; others were 
Busy at wrestling or to throw the bar, 
Ambitious which should bear the bell away, 
And kiss the nut-brown Lady of the May, 



Captain Dover's Cots wold Games 119 

This stirred them up ! A jolly swain was he 

Whom Peg and Susan, after victory, 

Crowned with a garland they had made, beset 

With daisies, pinks, and many a violet, 

Cowslip, and gilliflower. Rewards, though small, 

Encourage virtue ; but if none at all 

Meet her, she languisheth and dies, as now, 

Where worth's denied the honour of a bough." 

Thenot deplores the decline of these merry sports, and 
Collen I informs him that it is the work of certain 
splenetic persons, given up to extreme piety. 

" These teach that dancing is a Jezebel, 
And barley-break the ready way to hell ; 
The morrice, idols ; Whitsun-ales can be 
But profane relics of a jubilee ; 
These, in a zeal to express how much they do 
The organs hate, have silenced bagpipes too ; 
And harmless maypoles all are railed upon. 
As if they were the towers of Babylon." 

Thenot, crying out against these deluded bigots, longs 
for the time to come when such innocent pleasures 
may thrive again. Collen, at this, can no longer re- 
frain from telHng him that his prayer is heard, and 
that ^'Pan hath approved dancing shall be this year 
holy as is the motion of a sphere." Thenot cannot 
believe this good news, and begs for an explanation. 
He is told that Collen has just met a handsome fellow 
spurring a spirited steed over the plain towards Cots- 
wold ; and begging him to explain whither he went so 
blythe and so gaily decked, he told him to the Hill, 
where horses, fleet as sons of the wind, competed for 



I20 Seventeenth Century Studies 

prizes, and where the hounds went coursing with such 
musical, full cries, that Orion leaned out of heaven and 
wished his dog might be there to join in the races. 
Thenot rejoices again, and desires to know at whose 
bidding these noble games have recommenced. He is 
told that it is jovial Dover's deed, and CoUen closes 
by calling the nymphs around, and bidding them do 
honour to that great man. 

" Go, maids, and lilies get, 
To make him up a glorious coronet ; 
Swains, keep his holiday, and each man swear 
To saint him in the Shepherd's Calendar. 

It is a most ingenious, pretty poem, one of the best 
eclogues we possess in English. 

Thomas Heywood comes in at the end of the book 
with a kind of appendix. After having read all the 
eulogies by the thirty-three poets, he professes himself 
at a loss to know what new thing to say. But the 
veteran who had already had a main finger in more 
than two hundred plays, and who was ready, as a 
satire falsely attributed to Cowley assures us, to write 
on any subject for the smallest pay, was not likely to 
be really at a loss for words. At the most reasonable 
computation, Heywood must at this time have been 
nearly seventy years of age, and the chirruping cheer- 
fulness of his lines is very consoling. The author of 
the " Panegerick " may have been old and poor, but he 
cannot have been very unhappy. His poem possesses 
no other significance than its joviality. Ben Jonson 
had declined to 'Mrop vies" between Olympus and 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 121 

Cotswold, but Heywood does not object to do, not 
this only, but to compare Dover with Hercules. The 
old poet being hard of hearing, we may whisper, 
confidentially, that his poem is, in truth, very dull 
and silly. 

The second-rate poets need not detain us long. 
Owen Feltham, so honourably known as the author of 
the Resolves^ was an exception to the general rule of 
the book, for he was still young, and to live for forty 
years more. His poem is in good supple verse, but 
obscure and affected to the last degree, like his prose 
in all but its best passages. Shackerley Marmion, 
author of the graceful epic poem of Cupid and 
Psyche and of several creditable plays, contributes 
one of the most readable and sensible pieces in the 
volume, congratulating Dover on his good work with- 
out ridiculous extravagance. Marmion was soon 
after to die miserably of a sickness brought on by 
marching as a soldier in Sir John Suckling\s troop on 
the ill-starred expedition to Scotland. ''A goodly, 
proper gentleman," as Anthony a Wood calls him, 
to whose merits posterity has scarcely been just. 
Finally, in return for all the kind wishes expressed, 
Robert Dover himself essays ^*A Congratulatory 
Poem to my Poetical and Learned Friends, Com- 
pilers of this Book," in which, with considerable 
humour, he defends his love of athletic sports against 
the Puritans, who are so ready to see '' wicked, horrid 
sin" in every kind of innocent pastime. Such are 
the contents of a volume of unusual interest, adorned 
with many illustrious names, and destined to pre- 



122 Seventeenth Century Studies 

serve the memory of an interesting public movement, 
which, but for the existence of these verses, we 
should scarcely have heard of; for it was the accident 
of Anthony a Wood^s possession of the book in his 
library that led him to turn aside into pleasant gossip 
about the person celebrated in it. 

Captain Robert Dover did not long survive the 
apotheosis and the destruction of his games. The 
one occurred in 1636, the other probably in 1638, 
and in 164.1 he died at Stan way. He had a nephew 
or a grandson, who became a small dramatist during 
the Restoration. The scenes of the Cotswold games 
were left intact, and, according to a manuscript in 
the possession of the late Sir Thomas Winnington, 
the sports themselves were revived in the reign of 
Charles II. It was probably very soon after this 
second revival that their neighbourhood was the scene 
of a most lurid and mysterious event, which I may 
be permitted to recount as a foil to the jovialty of 
the games themselves. Mr. William Harrison, the 
steward of a wealthy lady of Chipping Campden, 
riding out from home one day in 1676 to collect the 
rents of his mistress at Charringworth, did not return 
at night. A servant of the house, John Perry, was 
sent to search for him in the morning, and when he 
returned without any news, a general examination of 
the neighbourhood began. In a lonely spot there 
were found a hat, a band, and a comb, which were 
recognised as having belonged to Mr. Harrison, and 
which were covered with blood. The body itself was 
not discovered, but the trial for murder began, and 



Captain Dover's Cotswold Games 123 

suspicion fell upon John Perry. This was increased 
by his confusion, and at last, cross-examined before 
the magistrates, he confessed that his mother and his 
brother had murdered Mr. Harrison, after robbing him 
of his effects. Circumstantial evidence was so strong 
against the prisoners, that, although the dead body had 
not been discovered, the Perrys were found guilty of 
the murder and all three were hanged, John Perry 
protesting with his last breath that he had made a 
mistake, or been deluded by his fancy. Every one in 
the district, however, was satisfied with the justice of 
the sentence, when, after two years were passed, one 
day Mr. Harrison came quietly riding into Chipping 
Campden, with the story that he had been met on the 
wold by a party of men, who, after a violent struggle, 
had secured him, had ridden hard with him to the sea, 
had sailed to Turkey with him, and had sold him as 
a slave to a Moslem physician. He declared that in 
the course of time he had escaped and fled on board 
a vessel bound for Portugal, whence he had found his 
way home again. What part of this romantic tale 
was true we know not; the horrible circumstance is 
the execution of the family of the Perrys on the 
strength of an hallucination. 

The Cotswold games, in a hueless and debased 
form, continued to be celebrated during Whitsun-week 
almost all through the last century; but they were 
vulgarised, and all the charming air of distinction that 
Captain Dover had given them vanished with his 
death. Yet in their original form they were well 
worthy to be remembered. These humane and inno- 



124 Seventeenth Century Studies 

cent sports, with their graceful mingling of antique 
revival with plain, homely English merriment, are 
characteristic of the very best side of the Royalist 
party in the seventeenth century, and they are not 
unimportant in helping us to realise the every-day life 
of gentry and peasantry in distant country places. 



ROBERT HERRICK 

IT is told of Mahommed that when the political econo- 
mists of the day provoked him by the narrowness 
of their utilitarian schemes, he was wont to silence 
them with these words : '* If a man has two loaves of 
bread, let him exchange one for some flowers of the 
narcissus; for bread only nourishes the body, but to 
look on the narcissus feeds the soul/' Robert Herrick 
was one of the few who have been content to carry out 
this precept, and to walk through life with a little bread 
in the one hand, and in the other a bunch of golden 
flowers. With an old serving-woman in a tumble-down 
country parsonage, his life passed merrily among such 
dreams as Oriental sultans wear themselves out to 
reahse, and his figure stands out in front of the shining 
ranks of his contemporaries as that around which 
most vividly of all there flashes the peculiar light of 
imagination. He may be well contrasted with a man 
whose native genius was probably exceedingly like his 
own, but whose life was as brilliant and eventful as 
Herrick's was retired, namely, Sir John Suckling. The 
wit, fire, and exuberant imagination that interpene- 
trated both found scope in the life of one and in the 
works of the other. Suckling's poems are strangely 
inadequate to represent his genius and fame ; Herrick, 



126 Seventeenth Century Studies 

on the other hand, may be taken almost as the typical 
poet, the man who, if not a lyrist, would be nothing 
— the birdlike creature whose only function was to 
sing in a cage of trammelling flesh. 

There are many features in his career, besides the 
actual excellence of his verse, which make him an 
object of peculiar interest. Among the pure poets he 
occupies the most prominent position in the school that 
flourished after Ben Jonson and before Milton, and 
though his life was of immense duration — he was 
born before Marlowe died, and died after the birth of 
Addison — his actual period of production covers the 
comparatively small space occupied by the reign of 
Charles I. This period was one of ^reat lyrical ability ; 
the drama was declining under Cartwright and Shirley, 
and all the young generation of poets, brought up at 
the feet of Jonson and Fletcher, were much more cap- 
able of writing songs than plays. Indeed, no one can 
at this time determine what degree of technical per- 
fection English literature might not have attained if the 
Royalist lyrists had been allowed to sun themselves 
unmolested about the fountains of Whitehall, and, un- 
troubled by the grave questions of national welfare, had 
been able to give their whole attention to the polishing 
of their verses. In fact, however, it will be noticed 
that only one of the whole school was undisturbed by 
the political crisis. The weaker ones, like Lovelace, 
were completely broken by it; the stronger, like 
Suckhng, threw themselves into public affairs with a 
zeal and intensity that supplied the place of the arti- 
ficial excitements of poetry so completely as to put a 



Robert Herrick 127 

stop to their writing altogether. Herrick alone, with 
imperturbable serenity, continued to pipe out his 
pastoral ditties, and crown his head with daffodils, 
when England was torn to pieces with the most 
momentous struggle for liberty in her annals. To the 
poetic student he is, therefore, of especial interest, as a 
genuine specimen of an artist pure and simple. Herrick 
brought out the Hesperides a few months before the 
King was beheaded, and people were invited to listen 
to little madrigals upon Julians stomacher at the singu- 
larly inopportune moment when the eyes of the whole 
nation were bent on the unprecedented phenomenon of 
the proclamation of an English republic. To find a 
parallel to such unconsciousness we must come down 
to our own time, and recollect that Theophile Gautier 
took occasion of the siege of Paris to revise and re- 
publish his Emaux et Camees. 

Herrick was born in London, in ^^the golden Cheap- 
side," and baptized on the 23rd of August 1591. His 
father died in the course of the next year, from a 
fall from an upper window, which was attributed to 
suicide. All we can guess about the poet's childhood 
is to be picked up in one of his own confidential pieces 
about himself, where he speaks with intense delight 
of his early life by the river-side, going to bathe in 
the '^ summer's sweeter evenings" with crowds of 
other youths, or gliding with pomp in a barge, with 
the young ladies of the period, ^'soft-smooth virgins," 
up as far as Richmond, Kingston, and Hampton Court* 
In the same poem he speaks of his '^beloved West- 
minster," from which allusion it has been illogically 



128 Seventeenth Century Studies 

imagined that he was at school there. The first 
certain fact in his life is that in 1607 he was appren- 
ticed to his uncle, the rich goldsmith of Wood Street, 
with whom one may presume that he remained until 
161 5, when we find him entered as fellow-commoner 
of St. John's College, Cambridge. His' London life, 
therefore, closed when his age was twenty-four, and 
his acquaintance with literary lifel in the metropolis 
must have come to rapid development within the eight 
years of his apprenticeship. Speculation in this case 
is not so vain as usual. If any fact about Herrick 
be certain, it is that he sat at the feet of Ben Jonson ; 
the poems of rapturous admiration and reverence that 
abound in the Hesperides set this beyond question. 
In one piece, it will be remembered, he speaks, with 
passion unusual to him, of the old days when Ben 
Jonson's plays were brought out at the London 
theatres, and gives us an important date by describing 
the unfavourable reception of the Alchemist^ much as 
a poet of the Romanticism would have described the 
reception of Hernani for the first time at the Theatre 
Frangais. But the Alchemist was brought out in 
16 10, when our poet was nineteen years old, and it 
was received with great excitement as an innovation. 
We may well believe that the young apprentice, fired 
with enthusiasm for the great poet, distinguished him- 
self by the loudness and truculence of his applause, 
and claimed the privilege of laying his homage after- 
wards at the author^s feet. Nineteen years later 
exactly the same thing was done by a younger genera- 
tion, when Carew, Randolph, and Cleaveland made a 



Robert Herrick 129 

riot at the damning of the New Inn, and then laid 
their lyric worship at the grand old poet's feet. 

Jonson loved to receive such homage, and to pose as 
the poet of the age; in fact, we cannot be too often 
reminded that to the intellectual public of that day he 
took exactly the same regal position among his contem- 
poraries that we now unanimously accord to Shake- 
speare. Taking for granted that Herrick became a 
familiar member of Jonson's circle about 1610, we must 
suppose him to have witnessed in succession the first 
performances of Catiline and oi Bartholomew Fair, and 
to have known the poet of the '^mountain belly and 
the rocky face '' at the very height of his creative power. 
More important for us, however, as being far more in 
unison with the tastes and genius of Herrick, are the 
masques upon which Jonson was engaged at this time. 
It is very strange that no writer upon the poetry of 
that age has noticed what an extraordinary influence 
the masques of Ben Jonson had upon Herrick. We 
have seen that he must have become acquainted with 
that poet in 1 6 10. It is more than remarkable to notice 
that it was in this year that Jonson produced Oberon 
the Fairy Prince, a beautiful masque that contains the 
germs of many of Herrick's most fantastic fairy-fancies. 
The Masque of Queens, brought out some months 
earlier, is full of Herrick-like passages about hags 
and witches ; and we might pursue the parallel much 
further, did space permit, showing how largely- Joiison, 
-on the milder and more lyrical side of his genius, in- 
spired the\young enthusiast and pointed out to him 
the poetic path that he should take. 



130 Seventeenth Century Studies 

We cannot with equal certainty say that Herrick was 
acquainted with any other of the great poets. Shake- 
speare was settled at Stratford, and in London only 
briefly and at distant intervals ; he died at the end of 
Herrick^s first year at Cambridge. Herrick writes of 
Fletcher thirty years later as though he had known him 
slightly, and speaks of the power of the MazcTs Tragedy 
to make ''young men swoon/^ as though he had seen 
it at the first performance in 161 1. He must have 
known Jonson's jolly friend Bishop Corbet, who was 
also a lover of fairy-lore, and he may have known 
Browne, whose poetry Jonson approved of, and who 
was then studying in the Inner Temple, and beginning 
to publish BritannicHs Pastorals. It was probably 
at this time, and through Ben Jonson, that he became 
acquainted with Selden, for whose prodigious learning 
and wit he preserved an extravagant admiration through 
life. This is as far as we dare to go in speculation. 
If Herrick, so fond of writing about himself, had found 
time for a few more words about his contemporaries, 
we might discover that he had dealings with other in- 
teresting men during this period of apprenticeship, but 
probably his circle was pretty much limited to the 
personal and intimate friends of Jonson. 

In 161 5, as we have said, he took up his abode at 
Cambridge as a fellow-commoner of St. John's, and here 
and at Trinity Hall he seems to have remained till 1629, 
when his mother died. How these fourteen years of 
early manhood were spent it is now impossible to con*- 
jecture. That he became Master of Arts in 1620 is not 
so important an item of history as that he was certainly 



Robert Herrick 131 

very poor, and in the habit of making a piteous annual 
appeal to his rich uncle for ten pounds to buy books 
with. Fourteen of these appeals exist, written in a 
florid, excited style, with a good many Latin quotations 
and old-fashioned references to " Apelles ye painter," in 
the manner of Euphues, It is amusing to note that he 
manages to spell his own surname in six different ways, 
and not one of them that which is now adopted on the 
authority of the title-page of the Hesperides. There 
can be no doubt that he began writing in London ; it is 
certain that he was known as a poet at Cambridge. One 
of the few dates in the Hesperides is 1627, two years 
before the exodus into Devonshire, and in ''Lacrime" he 
says that before he went into exile into the loathed west 

" He could rehearse 
A lyric verse, 
And speak it with the best." 

The Hesperides^ in its present state, offers no assistance 
to us in trying to discover what was written early or 
late, for nothing is more obvious than that the verses 
were thrown together without the slightest regard to 
the chronology of their composition. However, on 
the 2nd of October 1629, he succeeded Potter, Bishop 
of Carlisle, in the living of Dean Prior, under Dart- 
moor, in South Devon, and there he remained in quiet 
retirement until 1648, when he was ejected by the 
Puritans. 

Such is the modest biography of this poet up to the 
time of the publication of the two books which caused 
and have retained his great reputation. Fortunately 



132 Seventeenth Century Studies 

he has himself left copious materials for autobiography 
in the gossipy pages of his own confidential poems. 
Glancing down the index to the Hesperides^ one is 
constantly struck by such titles as *^On Himself/^ 
'*To His Muse/' and ^'His Farewell to Sack/' and 
one is not disappointed in turning to these to collect 
an impression of the author's individuality. Indeed, 
few writers of that age appear more vividly in relief 
than Herrick ; the careful student of his poems learns 
to know him at last as a familiar friend, and every 
feature of body and mind stands out clearly before the 
eye of the imagination. He was physically a some- 
what gross person, as far as his portrait will enable 
one to judge, with great quantities of waving or curling 
black hair, and a slight black moustache ; the eyebrows 
distinct and well arched, the upper lip short, the nose 
massive and Roman. In the weighty points of the 
face, especially in the square and massive under-jaw, 
there is much of the voluptuous force of the best type 
among the Roman emperors; and bearing these features 
well in mind, it becomes easy to understand how it was 
that Herrick came to write so much that an English 
gentleman, not to say clergyman, had better have left 
unsaid. His temperament was scarcely clerical : — 

" I fear no earthly powers, 
But care for crowns of flowers ; 
And love to have my beard 
With wine and oil besmeared. 
This day I'll drown all sorrow ; 
Who knows to live to-morrow ? " 

This was his philosophy, and it is not to be dis- 



Robert Herrick 133 

tinguished from that of Anacreon or Horace. One 
knows not how the old pagan dared to be so outspoken 
in his dreary Devonshire vicarage, with no wild friends 
to egg him on or to applaud his fine frenzy. 

His Epicureanism was plainly a matter of convic- 
tion, and though he wrote Noble Numbers^ preached 
sermons, and went through all the perfunctory duties 
of his office, it is not in these that he lives and has his 
pleasure, but in half-classical dreams about Favonius 
and Isis, and in flowery mazes of sweet thoughts 
about fair, half-imaginary women. It matters little 
to him what divinity he worships, if he may wind 
daffodils into the god's bright hair. In one hand he 
brings a garland of yellow flowers for the amorous 
head of Bacchus, with the other he decks the osier- 
cradle of Jesus with roses and Lent-lilies. He has 
no sense of irreverence in this rococo devotion. It 
is the attribute, and not the deity he worships. There 
is an airy frivolity, an easy-going callousness of soul, 
that makes it impossible for him to feel very deeply. 

There is a total want of passion in Herrick's language 
about women. The nearest approach to it, perhaps, 
is in the wonderful song '^To Anthea," where the 
lark-like freshness of the ascending melody closely 
simulates intense emotion. With all his warmth of 
fancy and luxurious animalism, he thinks more of the 
pretty eccentricities of dress than of the charms the 
garments contain. He is enraptured with the way in 
which the Countess of Cariisle wears a riband of black 
silk twisted round her arm ; he palpitates with pleasure 
when Mistress Katherine Bradshaw puts a crown of 



134 Seventeenth Century Studies 

laurel on his head, falling on one knee, we may believe, 
and clasping his hands as he receives it. He sees 
his loves through the medium of shoe-strings and 
pomander bracelets, and is alive, as no poet has been 
before or since, to the picturesqueness of dress. 
Everybody knows his exquisite lines about the ** tem- 
pestuous petticoat, ^^ and his poems are full of little 
touches no less delicate than this. 

Only two things make him really serious : one is 
his desire of poetic fame. Every lyric he writes he 
considers valuable enough to be left as a special legacy 
to some prime friend. He is eager to die before the 
world; to pass away, like Pindar, garlanded, and 
clasped in the arms of love, while the theatre resounds 
with plaudits. His thirst for fame is insatiable, and 
his confidence of gaining it intense. His poesy is 
**his hope and his pyramides," a living pillar ^^ ne'er 
to be thrown down by envious Time," and it shall be 
the honour of great musicians to set his pieces to 
music when he is dead. When he is dead ! That has 
a saddening sound ! Life was meant to last for ever, 
and it makes him angry to think of death. He rings 
his head about with roses, clasps Julia to his arms, 
and will defy death. Yet, if death should come, as 
he sometimes feels it must, he is not unmindful of 
what his end should be. No thoughts of a sad funeral 
or the effrontery of a Christian burial oppress him; 
he cannot even think of dismal plumes or of a hearse. 
He will be wound in one white robe, and borne to a 
quiet garden-corner, where the overblown roses may 
shower petals on his head, and where, when the first 



Robert Herrick 135 

primrose blossoms, Perilla may remember him, and 
come to weep over his dust : — 

" Then shall my ghost not walk about, but keep 
Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep." 

He was never married; he explains over and over 
again that he values his hberty far too highly to give 
it into any woman^s hands, and lived in the country, 
as it would seem, with no company save that of an 
excellent old servant, Prudence Baldwin. 

In many sweet and sincere verses he gives us a 
charming picture of the quiet life he led in the Devon- 
shire parsonage that he affected to loathe so much. 
The village had its rural and semi-pagan customs, that 
pleased him thoroughly. He loved to see the brown 
lads and lovely girls, crowned with daffodils and 
daisies, dancing in the summer evenings in a comely 
country round ; he delighted in the maypole, ribanded 
and garlanded like a thyrsus, reminding his florid 
fancy of Bacchus and the garden god. There were 
morris dances at Dean Prior, wakes and quintels ; 
mummers, too, at Christmas, and quaint revellings 
on Twelfth Night, with wassail bowls and nut-brown 
mirth ; and we can imagine with what zeal the good 
old pagan would encourage these rites against the 
objections of any roundhead Puritan who might come 
down with his newfangled Methodistical notions to 
trouble the sylvan quiet of Dean Prior. For Herrick 
the dignity of episcopal authorship had no charm, and 
the thunders of Nonconformity no terror. Graver 
minds were at this moment occupied with Holy Living 



136 Seventeenth Century Studies 

and Holy Dyings and thrilled with the Sermons of 
Calamy. It is delightful to think of Herrick, bliss- 
fully unconscious of the tumult of tongues and all 
the windy war, more occupied with morris dances 
and barley-breaks than with prayer-book or psalter. 
The Revolution must indeed have come upon him 
unaware. 

Herrick allowed himself to write a great deal of 
nonsense about his many mistresses. It'^was the false 
Anacreontic spirit of the day; and a worse offender 
was in the field, even Abraham Cowley, who, never 
having had the courage to speak of love to a single 
woman, was about to publish, in 1648, a circumstantial 
account of his affairs with more than one-and-twenty 
mistresses. It is not easy to determine how much of 
Herrick^s gallantry is as imaginary as this. We may 
dismiss Perilla, Silvia, Anthea, and the rest at once, 
as airy nothings, whom the poet created for the sake 
of hanging pretty amorous fancies on their names; 
but Julia is not so ephemeral or so easily disposed of 
She may well be supposed to have died or passed 
away before Herrick left Cambridge. All the poet's 
commentators seem to have forgotten how old he was 
before he retired to that country vicarage where they 
rightly enough perceive that the presence of a Julia 
was impossible. When we recollect that he did not 
enter holy orders till he was thirty-eight, we may well 
believe that Julia ruled his youth, and yet admit his 
distinct statement with regard to his clerical life, that 

" Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste." 



Robert Herrick 137 

We have a minute chronicle of Julians looks and 
ways in the HesperzdeSy and they bear a remarkable 
air of truth about them. She is presented to us as 
a buxom person, with black eyes, a double chin, 
and a strawberry-cream complexion. Her attire, as 
described by our milliner-poet, is in strict accord- 
ance with the natural tastes of a woman of this 
physical nature. She delights in rich silks and deep- 
coloured satins; on one occasion she wears a dark 
blue petticoat, starred with gold, on other she ravishes 
her poet-lover by the glitter and vibration of her 
silks as she takes her stately walks abroad. Her 
hair, despite her dark eyes, is bright and dewy, and 
the poet takes a fantastic pleasure in tiring and 
braiding it. An easy, kindly woman, we picture her 
ready to submit to the fancies of her lyric lover; 
pleased to have roses on her head, still more 
pleased to perfume herself with storax, spikenard, 
galbanum, and all the other rich gums he loved to 
smell; dowered with so much refinement of mind as 
was required to play fairly on the lute, and to govern a 
wayward poet with tact ; not so modest or so sensitive 
as to resent the grossness of his fancy, yet respectable 
enough and determined enough to curb his license at 
times. She bore him one daughter, it seems, to whom 
he addressed one of his latest poems and one of his 
tamest. 

But it is time to turn from the poet to his work, 
from Julia to the Hesperides that she inspired. They 
are songs, children of the West, brought forth, if not 
conceived, in the soft, sweet air of Devonshire. And 



13S Seventeenth Century Studies 

the poet strikes a keynote with wonderful sureness 
in the opening couplets of the opening poem : — 

" I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, 
Of April, May, of June and July flowers ; 
I sing of maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes." 

It would not have been easy to describe more 
correctly what he does sing of. The book is full of 
all those pleasant things of spring and summer, full of 
young love, happy nature, and the joy of mere exis- 
tence. As far as flowers are concerned, the atmo- 
sphere is full of them. We are pelted with roses and 
daffodils from every page, and no one dares enter the 
sacred precincts without a crown of blossoms on his 
hair. Herrick^s muse might be that Venus of Botticelli 
who rises, pale and dewy, from a sparkling sea, blown 
at by the little laughing winds, and showered upon 
with violets and lilies of no earthly growth. He tells 
us that for years and years his muse was content to 
stay at home, or straying from village to village, to 
pipe to handsome young shepherds and girls of flower- 
sweet breath, but that at last she became ambitious to 
try her skill at Court, and so came into print in London. 
In other words, these little poems circulated widely in 
manuscript long before they were published. They are 
not all of the bird and blossom kind, unhappily ; the 
book is fashioned, as we shall presently see, closely 
upon the model of the Epigrams of Martial ; and as 
there the most delicate and jewel-like piece of senti- 
ment rubs shoulders with a coarse and acrid quatrain 



Robert Herrick 139 

of satire, so has Herrick shuffled up odes, epithalamia, 
epigrams, occasional verses and canzonets, in glorious 
confusion, without the slightest regard to subject, form, 
or propriety. There are no less than one thousand 
two hundred and thirty-one distinct poems in the book, 
many of them, of course, only two lines long. There 
are too many '* epigrams," as he called them, scraps 
of impersonal satire, in the composition of which he 
followed Ben Jonson, who had followed Martial. 
These little couplets and quatrains are generally very 
gross, very ugly, and very pointless ; they have, some- 
times, a kind of broad Pantagruelist humour about 
them which has its merit, but it must be confessed 
even of these that they greatly spoil the general com- 
plexion of the book. 

More worthy of attention in every way are the erotic 
lyrical pieces, which fortunately abound, and which 
are unrivalled in our literature for their freshness and 
tender beauty. They are interpenetrated with strong 
neo-pagan emotion ; had they been written a century 
earlier, they would be called the truest English expres- 
sion of the passion of the Renaissance. This is, how- 
ever, what they really are. Late in the day as they 
made their appearance, they were as truly an expres- 
sion of the delirious return to the freedom of classical 
life and enjoyment as the Italian paintings of the 
fifteenth or the French poetry of the sixteenth century. 
The tone of the best things in the Hesperides is pre- 
cisely the same as that which permeates the wonderful 
designs of the Hypnerotomachia, In Herrick's poems, 
as in that mysterious and beautiful romance, the sun 



140 Seventeenth Century Studies 

shines on a world re-arisen to the duty of pleasure ; 
Bacchus rides through the valleys, with his leopards 
and his maidens and his ivy-rods; loose-draped nymphs, 
playing on the lyre, bound about their foreheads with 
vervain and the cool stalks of parsley, fill the silent 
woods with their melodies and dances ; this poet sings 
of a land where all the men are young and strong, and 
all the women lovely, where life is only a dream of 
sweet dehghts of the bodily senses. The Hesperides 
is an astounding production when one considers when 
it was written, and how intensely grave the temper 
of the age had become. But Herrick hated sobriety 
and gravity, and distinguished very keenly between 
the earnestness of art and the austerity of religion. 
Here he lays down his own canons : — 

"In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse 
The holy incantation of a verse ; 
But when that men have both well drunk and fed, 
Let my enchantments then be sung or read. 
When laurel spirts in the fire, and when the hearth 
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth. 
When up the thyrse is raised, and when the sound 
Of sacred orgies flies around, around. 
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine, 
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine." 

At such moments as these Herrick is inspired above 
a mortal pitch, and listens to the great lyre of Apollo 
with the rapture of a prophet. From a very interest- 
ing poem, called "The Apparition of his Mistress 
calling him to Elysium," we quote a few lines that 
exemplify at the same moment his most ideal condition 



Robert Herrick 141 

of fancy and the habitual oddities of his style. This 
is the landscape of the Hesperides, the golden isles of 
Herrick^s imagination : — 

" Here in green meadows sits eternal May, 
Purpling the margents, while perpetual day 
So doubly gilds the air, as that no night 
Can ever rust the enamel of the light. 
Here naked younglings, handsome striplings, run 
Their goals for maidens' kisses, which when done, 
Then unto dancing forth the learned round 
Commixt they meet, with endless roses crowned ; 
And here we'll sit on primrose-banks, and see 
Love's chorus led by Cupid." 

But although he lived in this ideal scenery, he was not 
entirely unconscious of what actually lay around him. 
He was the earliest English poet to see the picturesque- 
ness of homely country life, and all his little landscapes 
are exquisitely delicate. No one has ever known better 
than Herrick how to seize, without effort and yet to 
absolute perfection, the pretty points of modern pas- 
toral life. Of all these poems of his, none surpasses 
"Corinna's going a-Maying," which has something of 
Wordsworth's faultless instinct and clear perception. 
The picture given here of the slim boys and the girls 
in green gowns going out singing into the corridors 
of blossoming whitethorn, when the morning sun is 
radiant in all its '^ fresh-quilted colours," is ravishing, 
and can only be compared for its pecuUar charm with 
that other where the maidens are seen at sunset, with 
silvery naked feet and dishevelled hair crowned with 
honeysuckle, bearing cowslips home in wicker-baskets. 



142 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Whoever will cast his eye over the pages of the 
HesperideSy will meet with myriads of original and 
charming passages of this kind : — 

" Like to a solemn sober stream 
Bankt all with lilies, and the cream 
Of sweetest cowslips filling them," 

the '' cream of cowslips " being the rich yellow anthers 
of the water-lilies. Or this, comparing a bride^s breath 
to the faint, sweet odour of the earth : — 

" A savour like unto a blessed field. 
When the bedabbled mom 
Washes the golden ears of com." 

Or this, a sketched interior : — 

" Yet can thy humble roof maintain a choir 
Of singing crickets by the fire. 
And the brisk mouse may feed herself with crumbs, 
Till that the green-eyed kitling comes." 

Nor did the homehest details of the household escape 
him. At Dean Prior his clerical establishment con- 
sisted of Prudence Baldwin, his ancient maid, of a 
cock and hen, a goose, a tame lamb, a cat, a spaniel, 
and a pet pig, learned enough to drink out of a tankard; 
and not only did the genial vicar divide his loving 
attention between the various members of this happy 
family, but he was wont, a little wantonly, one fears, 
to gad about to wakes and wassailings and to increase 
his popular reputation by showing off his marvellous 
learning in old rites and ceremonies. These he has 
described with loving minuteness, and not these only, 



Robert Herrick 143 

but even the little arts of cookery do not escape him. 
Of all his household poems, not one is more character- 
istic and complete than the "Bride-cake/' which we 
remember having had recited to us years ago with 
immense gusto, at the making of a great pound-cake, 
by a friend since widely known as a charming follower 
of Herrick^s poetic craft : — 

" This day, my Julia, thou must make 
For Mistress Bride the wedding-cake ; 
Knead but the dough, and it will be 
To paste of almonds turned by thee, 
Or kiss it, thou, but once or twice, 
And for the bride-cake there'll be spice." 

There is one very curious omission in all his de- 
scriptions of nature, in that his landscapes are without 
background; he is photographically minute in giving 
us the features of the brook at our feet, the farmyard 
and its inmates, the open fireplace and the chimney 
corner, but there is no trace of anything beyond, and 
the beautiful distances of Devonshire, the rocky tors, 
the rugged line of Dartmoor, the glens in the hills — of 
all these there is not a trace. In this he contrasts 
curiously with his contemporary William Browne, 
another Devonshire poet, whose pictures are infinitely 
vaguer and poorer than Herrick's, but who has more 
distanfce, and who succeeds in giving a real notion of 
Devonian rock and moor, which Herrick never so 
much as suggests. In short, it may be said that 
Herrick made for himself an Arcadian world, in the 
centre of which the ordinary daily life of a country 
parish went contentedly on, surrounded by an imagi- 



144 Seventeenth Century Studies 

nary land of pastoral peace and plenty, such as England 
can hardly have been then in the eyes of any other 
mortal, unless in those of the French poet St. Amant, 
who came over to the court at Whitehall just before 
the Rebellion broke out, while Herrick was piping at 
Dean Prior, and who on his return wrote a wonder- 
fully fulsome ode to their serenest majesties Charles 
and Mary, in which he took precisely the same view of 
our island as Herrick did : — 

" Oui, c'est ce pays bienheureux 

Qu'avec des regards amoureux 

Le reste du monde contemple ; 
C'est cette ile fameuse ou tant d'aventuriers 

Et tant de beautes sans exemple 
Joignirent autrefois les myrtes aux lauriers ! " 

St. Amant lived to alter his opinion, and hurl curses 
at the unconscious Albion ; but to Herrick the change 
came too late, and when the sunshine ceased to warm 
him, he simply ceased to sing, as we shall see. 

The personal epithalamium is a form of verse which 
had a very brief period of existence in England, and 
which has long been completely extinct. Its theme 
and manner gave too much opportunity to lavish adu- 
lation on the one hand, and unseemly innuendo on 
the other, to suit the preciser manners of our more 
reticent age; but it flourished for the brief period 
contained between 1600 and 1650, and produced 
some exquisite masterpieces. The Epithalamion and 
Prothalamion of Spenser struck the keynote of a 
fashion that Drayton, Ben Jonson, and others adorned, 
and of which Herrick was the last and far from the 



Robert Herrick 145 

least ardent votary. His confidential muse was de- 
lighted at being asked in to arrange the ceremonies 
of a nuptial feast, and described the bride and her 
surroundings with a world of pretty extravagance. 
Every admirer of Herrick should read the '' Nuptial 
Ode on Sir Clipseby Crew and his Lady." It is 
admirably fanciful, and put together with consummate 
skill. It opens with a choral outburst of greeting 
to the bride: — 

" What's that we see from far ? the spring of day 
Bloom'd from the east, or fair enje welled May 
Blown out of April ? or some new 
Star filled with glory to our view 

Reaching at Heaven, 
To add a nobler planet to the seven ? " 

Less and less dazzled, he declares her to be some 
goddess'] floating out of Elysium in a cloud of tiffany. 
She leaves the church treading upon scarlet and amber, 
and spicing the chafed air with fumes of Paradise. Then 
they watch her coming towards them down the shining 
street, whose very pavement breathes out spikenard. 
But who is this that meets '^her ? Hymen, with his 
fair white feet, and head with marjoram crowned, who 
lifts his torch, and, behold, by his side the bridegroom 
stands, flushed and ardent. Then the maids shower 
them with shamrock and roses, and so the dreamy 
verses totter under their load of perfumed words, till 
they close with a benediction over the new-married 
couple, and a peal of maiden laughter over love and its 
flower-like mysteries. 

Once more, before we turn to more general matters, 

K 



146 Seventeenth Century Studies 

there is one section of the Hesperides that demands 
a moment^s attention — that, namely, devoted to de- 
scriptions of Fairyland and its inhabitants. We have 
seen that it was probably the performance of Ben 
Jonson's pretty masque of Oberon that set Herrick 
dreaming about that misty land where elves sit eat- 
ing butterflies^ horns round Httle mushroom tables, 
or quaff draughts 

" Of pure seed-pearl of morning dew, 
Brought and besweetened in a blue 
And pregnant violet." 

And with him the poetic literature of Fairyland ended. 
He was its last laureate, for the Puritans thought its 
rites, though so shadowy, superstitious, and frowned 
upon their celebration, while the whole temper of the 
Restoration, gross and dandified at the same time, was 
foreign to such pure play of the imagination. But some 
of the greatest names of the great period had entered 
its sacred bounds and sung its praises. Shakespeare 
had done it eternal honour in A Midsummer-Nighfs 
Dream^ and Drayton had written an elaborate romance, 
The Court of Faerie, Jonson^s friend Bishop Corbet 
had composed fairy ballads that had much of Herrick^s 
lightness about them. It was these hterary traditions 
that Herrick carried with him into the west; it does 
not seem that he collected any fresh information about 
the mushroom world in Devonshire ; we read nothing 
of river-wraiths or pixies in his poems. He adds, 
however, a great deal of ingenious fancy to the stores 
he received from his elders; and his fairy-poems, all 



Robert Herrick i47 

written in octosyllabic verse, as though forming parts 
of one projected work, may be read with great interest 
as a kind of final compendium of all that the poets of 
the seventeenth century imagined about fairies. 

Appended to the Hesperides, but bearing date one 
year earlier, is a little book of poems, similar to these 
in outward form, but dealing with sacred subjects. 
Here our pagan priest is seen, despoiled of his vine- 
wreath and his thyrsus, doing penance in a white 
sheet and with a candle in his hand. That rubicund 
visage, with its sly eye and prodigious jowl, looks 
ludicrously out of place in the penitential surplice ; 
but he is evidently sincere, though not very deep, 
in his repentance, and sings hymns of faultless ortho- 
doxy, with a loud and lusty voice to the old pagan 
airs. Yet they are not inspiriting reading, save where 
they are least Christian ; there is none of the reli- 
gious passion of Crashaw, burning the weak heart 
away in a flame of adoration, none of the sweet and 
sober devotion of Herbert — nothing, indeed, from an 
ecclesiastical point of view, so good as the best of 
Vaughan, the Silurist. Where the Noble Numbers 
are most readable is where they are most secular. 
One sees the same spirit here as throughout the 
worldty poems. In a charming little '' Ode to Jesus " 
he wishes the Saviour to be crowned with roses and 
daffodils, and laid in a neat white osier cradle ; in 
**The Present," he will take a rose to Christ and, 
sticking it in His stomacher, beg for one mellifluous 
kiss." The epigrams of the earlier volume are re- 
placed in the Noble Numbers by a series of couplets. 



148 Seventeenth Century Studies 

attempting to define the nature of God, of which none 
equals in neatness this, which is the last : — 

" Of all the good things whatsoe'er we do, 
God is the 'Ap^^ and the TiXos too." 

As might be expected, his religion is as grossly an- 
thropomorphic as it is possible to be. He almost sur- 
passes in indiscretion those mediaeval priests of Picardy 
who brought such waxen images to the Madonna's 
shrine as no altar had seen since pagan days ; and 
certain verses on the circumcision are more revolting 
in their grossness than any of those erotic poems — 

" unbaptized rhymes 
Writ in my wild unhallowed times" — 

for which he so ostentatiously demands absolution. 

It is pleasant to turn from these to the three or 
four pieces that are in every way worthy of his 
genius. Of these, the tenderest is the ** Thanks- 
giving," where he is delightfully confidential about his 
food, thus : — 

*' Lord, I confess, too, when I dine 

The pulse is Thine, 
And all those other bits that be 

Placed there by Thee, — 
The worts, the purslain, and the mess 

Of water-cress. 

'Tis Th(5u that crown'st my glittering hearth 

With guiltless mirth, 
And giv'st me wassail-bowls to drink, 

Spiced to the brink.'* 



Robert Herrick i49 

And about his house : — 

" Like as my parlour, so my hall 
And kitchen's small, 
A little buttery, and therein 
A little bin." 

The wild and spirited '^ Litany " is too well known 
to be quoted here, but there are two very fine odes in 
the Noble Numbers that are hardly so familiar. One 
is the " Dirge of Jephthah^s Daughter," written in a 
wonderfully musical and pathetic measure, and full of 
fine passages, of which this is a fair sample : — 

" May no wolf howl, or screech-owl stir 
A wing about thy sepulchre ! 
No boisterous winds or storms come hither 

To starve or wither 
Thy soft sweet earth, but, like a spring, 
Love keep it ever flourishing." 

But beyond question the cleverest and at the 
same time the most odd poem in the Noble Numbers 
is '' The Widows' Tears ; or. Dirge of Dorcas," a 
lyrical chorus supposed to be wailed out by the 
widows over the death-bed of Tabitha. The bereaved 
ladies disgrace themselves, unfortunately, by the greedi- 
ness of their regrets, dwelling on the loss to them of 
the bread — " ay ! and the flesh and the fish " — that 
Dorcas was wont to give them ; but the poem has 
stanzas of marvellous grace and delicacy, and the 
metre in which it is written is peculiarly sweet. But 
truly Herrick's forte did not lie in hymn-writing, nor 
was he able to refrain from egregious errors of taste, 
whenever he attempted to reduce his laughing features 



150 Seventeenth Century Studies 

to a proper clerical gravity. Of all his solecisms, how- 
ever, none is so monstrous as one almost incredible poem 
'*To God," in which he gravely encourages the Divine 
Being to read his secular poems, assuring Him that — 

" Thou, my God, may'st on this impure look, 
Yet take no tincture from my sinful book." 

For unconscious impiety this rivals the famous 
passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted God 
to ''pause and think." 

We have now rapidly considered the two volumes 
on which Herrick claims his place among the best 
English lyrical poets. Had he written twenty instead 
of two, he could not have impressed his strong poetic 
individuality more powerfully on our literature than 
he has done in the Hesperides. It is a storehouse of 
lovely things, full of tiny beauties of varied kind and 
workmanship ; like a box full of all sorts of jewels — 
ropes of seed-pearl, opals set in old-fashioned shifting 
settings, antique gilt trifles sadly tarnished by time; 
here a ruby, here an amethyst, and there a stray 
diamond, priceless and luminous, flashing light from all 
its facets, and dulling the faded jewellery with which it 
is so promiscuously huddled. What gives a special 
value to the book is the originality and versatility of 
the versification. There is nothing too fantastic for 
the author to attempt, at least; there is one poem 
written in rhyming triplet, each line having only two 
syllables. There are clear little trills of sudden song, 
like the lines to the '' Lark ; '' there are chance 
melodies that seem like mere wantonings of the air 



Robert Herrick 151 

upon a wind-harp ; there are such harmonious endings 
as this, ^* To Music " : — 

" Fall on me like a silent dew, 
Or like those maiden showers 
Which by the peep of day do strew 
A baptism o'er the flowers. 
Melt, melt my pains 
With thy soft strains, 
That, having ease me given, 
With full delight 
I leave this light 
And take my flight 
For heaven." 

With such poems as these, and with the delicious 
songs of so many of Herrick's predecessors and com- 
peers before them, it is inexplicable upon what pos- 
sible grounds the critics of the eighteenth century 
can have founded their astonishing dogma that the 
first master of English versification was Edmund 
Waller, whose poems, appearing some fifteen years 
after the Hesperides, are chiefly remarkable for their 
stiff and pedantic movement, and the brazen clang, as 
of stage armour, of the dreary heroic couplets in which 
they strut. Where Waller is not stilted, he owes his 
excellence to the very source from which the earlier 
lyrists took theirs — a study of nature and a free but 
not licentious use of pure English. But not one of his 
songs, except " Go, Lovely Rose,'^ is worth the slightest 
of those delicate warbles that Herrick piped out when 
the sun shone on him and the flowers were fresh. 

It is an interesting speculation to consider from what 
antique sources Herrick, athirst for the pure springs of 



152 Seventeenth Century Studies 

pagan beauty, drank the deep draughts of his inspira- 
tion. Ben Jonson it was, beyond doubt, who first 
introduced him to the classics, but his mode of accept- 
ing the ideas he found there was wholly his own. In 
the first place, one must contradict a statement that all 
the editors of Herrick have repeated, sheep-like, from 
one another, namely, that Catullus was his great ex- 
ample and model. In all the editions of the Hesperides 
we find the same old blunder: ^' There is no collection 
of poetry in our language which more nearly resem- 
bles the Carmina of Catullus." In reality, it would be 
difficult to name a lyric poet with whom he has less 
in common than with the Veronese, whose eagle-flights 
into the very noonday depths of passion, swifter than 
Shelley's, as flaming as Sappho's, have no sort of 
fellowship with the pipings of our gentle and luxurious 
babbler by the flowery brooks. In one of his poems, 
"To Live Merrily," where he addresses the various 
classical poets, and where, by the way, he tries to 
work himself into a great exaltation about Catullus, he 
does not even mention the one from whom he really 
took most of form and colour. No one carefully reading 
the Hesperides can fail to be struck with the extraordi- 
nary similarity they bear to the Epigrams of Martial ; 
and the parallel will be found to run throughout the writ- 
ings of the two poets, for good and for bad, the differ- 
ence being that Herrick is much the more religious pagan 
of the two, and that he is as much a rural as Martial 
an urban poet. But in the incessant references to him- 
self and his book, the fondness for gums and spices, the 
delight in the picturesqueness of private life, the art 



Robert Herrick 153 

of making a complete and gemlike poem in the fewest 
possible lines, the curious mixture of sensitiveness and 
utter want of sensibility, the trick of writing confidential 
little poems to all sorts of friends, the tastelessness 
that mixes up obscene couplets with delicate odes 
" De Hortis Martialis " or " To Anthea "—in all these 
and many more qualities one can hardly tell where to 
look for a literary parallel more complete. As far as 
I know, Herrick mentions Martial but once, and then 
very slightly. He was fond of talking about the old 
poets in his verse, but never with any critical clever- 
ness. The best thing he says about any of them is 
said of Ovid in a pretty couplet. In a dream he sees 
Ovid lying at the feet of Corinna, who presses 

" With ivory wrists his laureat head, and steeps 
His eyes in dew of kisses while he sleeps." 

How much further Herrick's learning proceeded it 
is difficult to tell. Doubtless he knew some Greek; 
he mentions Homer and translates from the spurious 
Anacreon. The English poets of that age, learned as 
many of them were, do not seem to have gone much 
further than Rome for their inspiration. Chapman is, 
of course, a great exception. But none of them, as 
all the great French poets of the Renaissance did, went 
directly to the Anthology, Theocritus and Anacreon. 
Perhaps Herrick had read the Planudian Anthology ; 
the little piece called ** Leander's Obsequies " seems as 
though it must be a translation of the epigram of 
Antipater of Thessalonica. 

It is curious to reflect that at the very time that the 



154 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Hesperides was printed; Salmasius, soon to be hunted 
to death by the implacable hatred of Milton, was 
carrying about with him in his restless wanderings 
the manuscript of his great discovery, the inestimable 
Anthology of Constantine Cephalas. One imagines 
with what sympathetic brotherliness the Vicar of Dean 
Prior would have gossiped and glowed over the new 
storehouse of Greek song. That the French poets of 
the century before were known to Herrick is to me 
extremely doubtful. One feels how much there was in 
such a book as La Bergerie of Remy Belleau, in which 
our poet would have felt the most unfeigned delight, but 
I find no distinct traces of their style in his ; and unless 
the Parisian editions of the classics influenced him, I 
cannot think that he brought any honey, poisonous or 
other, from France. His inspiration was Latin; that 
of Ronsard and Jodelle essentially Greek. It was the 
publication of the Anthology in 1531, and of Henri 
Estienne's Anacreon in 1554, that really set the Pleiad 
in movement, and founded V ecole gallo-grecque. It was 
rather the translation of Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and Virgil 
that gave English Elizabethan poetry the start-word. 

To return to Herrick, there is not much more to say. 
He had sung all the songs he had to sing in 1648, being 
then fifty-seven years of age. He came up to London 
when the Puritans ejected him from his living, and 
seems to have been sprightly enough at first over the 
pleasant change to London life. Soon, however, bad 
times came. So many friends were gone ; Jonson was 
dead, and Fletcher; Selden was very old and in disgrace. 
It was poor work solacing himself with Sir John Denham, 



Robert Herrick 155 

and patronising that precocious lad Charles Cotton; 
and by-and-by the Puritans cut off his fifths, and poor 
old Herrick is vaguely visible to us in poor lodgings 
somewhere in Westminster, supported by the charity 
of relations. In August 1662, some one or other 
graciously recollected him, and he was sent back in 
his seventy-second year to that once detested vicarage 
in "rocky Devonshire," which must now have seemed 
a kind asylum for his old age. 

The latest verses of his which seem to have been 
preserved are these, carved on the tomb of two of his 
parishioners in the south aisle of Dean Prior Church — 

" No trust to metals nor to marbles, when 
These have their fate and wear away as men ; 
Times, titles, trophies may be lost and spent, 
But virtue rears the eternal monument. 
What more than these can tombs or tombstones pay ? 
But here's the sunset of a tedious day : 
These two asleep are : I'll but be undress'd 
And so to bed : pray wish us all good rest." 

There is something extremely pathetic in the complete 
obscurity of the poet^s last days. In those troublesome 
times his poetry, after a slight success, passed com- 
pletely out of all men^s minds. The idiotic Winstanley, 
in his Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, written 
shortly after Herrick's death, says that '^but for the 
interruption of trivial passages, he might have made 
up none of the worst poetic landscapes." This is the 
last word spoken, as I think, on Herrick, till Mr. 
Nichols, revived his fame in 1796. All we know of his 
latest years is summed up in one short extract from 



156 Seventeenth Century Studies 

the church register of Dean Prior : *' Robert Herrick, 
vicker, was buried ye 15th day of October 1674." By 
that time a whole new world was formed in poetry, 
Milton was dead; Wycherley and Dryden were the 
fashionable poets ; Addison and Swift were lately born ; 
next year the Pilgrim! s Progress was to appear; all 
things were preparing for that bewigged and bepowdered 
eighteenth century, with its mob of gentlemen who 
wrote with ease, its Augustan self-sufficiency, and its 
horror of nature ; and what wonder that no one cared 
whether Herrick were alive or dead ? 



1875. 



RICHARD CRASHAW 

NO sketch of the English literature of the middle 
of the seventeenth century can pretend to be 
complete if it does not tell us something of that 
serried throng of poets militant who gave in their 
allegiance to Laud, and became ornaments and then 
martyrs of the High Church party. Their piety was 
much more articulate and objective than that which 
had inspired the hymn-writers and various divine 
songsters of an earlier age; an element of political 
conviction, of anger and apprehension, gave ardour 
and tension to their song. They were conservative 
and passive, but not obhvious to the tendencies of the 
time, and the gathering flood of Puritanism forced 
them, to use an image that they would not themselves 
have disdained, to climb on to the very altar-step of 
ritualism, or even in extreme instances to take wing 
for the mystic heights of Rome itself. 

It is from such extreme instances as the latter that 
we learn to gauge their emotion and their desperation, 
and it is therefore Crashaw rather than Herbert whom 
we select for the consideration of a typical specimen 
of the High Church poets. Nor is it only the hysterical 
intensity of Crashaw's convictions which marks him 

out for our present purpose; his position in history, 

157 



158 Seventeenth Century Studies 

his manhood spent in the last years of the reign of 
*' Thorough/^ and in the very forefront of the crisis, 
give him a greater claim upon us than Herbert, 
who died before Laud succeeded to the Primacy, or 
Vaughan, who was still a boy when Straiford was 
executed. There are many other points of view from 1 
which Crashaw is of special interest; his works \ 
present the only important contribution to English 
literature made by a pronounced Catholic, embodying 
Catholic doctrine, during the whole of the seventeenth 
century, while as a poet, although extremely unequal, 
he rises, at his best, to a mounting fervour which is 
quite electrical, and hardly rivalled in its kind before 
or since. Nor is the story of his life, brief and vague 
though its outline may be, unworthy of having in- 
spired, as it has evidently done, that noble romance 
oi John Inglesant v/hich all the world has been reading 
with so much curiosity and delight. 

It has remained for Dr. Grosart to discover that 
Crashaw, who has hitherto been supposed to have 
been born in 161 6, must really have seen the light in 
161 2. His father, the Rev. William Crashaw, Vicar 
of Whitechapel and preacher at the Temple, was a 
notable Puritan divine. Forty years of age when his 
son was born, WiUiam Crashaw had grown up within 
the vehement and instant fear of Papal aggression, and 
had but become fiercer in his love for a simple Pro- 
testantism under the irritating pressure of James the 
Firsfs decisions. His numerous tracts and sermons 
are almost entirely devoted to an exposure of what he 
conceived to be the fatal errors of Rome, and their 



Richard Crashaw 159 

titles and contents have often been referred to in order 
to emphasise the difference between their study Pro- 
testantism and his son^s adoring Mysticism. The sug- 
gestive title-page of the Bespotted Jesuit^ however, is 
now proved to have been added by a zealous hand after 
his death; it is quite plain, at the same time, that he 
would not have shrunk from saying ^'bespotted," or 
something far worse, if it had occurred to him so to 
distinguish a Jesuit, a monk, or a friar. This vigorous 
personage was the intimate friend of Usher, who is 
said to have baptized Richard Crashaw, and to have 
buried a second Mrs. Crashaw, stepmother to the 
poet, who died at the age of twenty- four in 1620. It 
is pleasant to read the great diviners praise of ^'her 
singular motherly affection to the child of her pre- 
decessor." We learn also that she was a gentlewoman 
of considerable beauty and accomplishment, a good 
singer and dancer, and that she gave up the vanities 
of the world to marry a clergyman who may have 
been grim and who was certainly elderly. But of 
Crashaw's own mother we hear not a word, and even 
her Christian name is missing. 

The boy was admitted to the Charterhouse. In 
October 1626 his father died, leaving him an orphan 
at fourteen. His childhood is an absolute blank, until 
we find him elected, at the rather advanced age of 
nineteen, to be a scholar of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 
on July 6, 163 1. He became a matriculated pensioner 
of Pembroke on March 26, 1632, a Bachelor of Arts 
in 1634, was transferred to Peterhouse on November 
26, 1636, was elected a Fellow of that college in 1637, 



i6o Seventeenth Century Studies 

and became a Master of Arts in 1638, on the same 
day with his younger friend and enthusiastic admirer, 
Joseph Beaumont, afterwards Master of Peterhouse. 
He was finally ejected, in company with a large 
number of other Royalist gentlemen, by the Earl of 
Manchester, on June 11, 1644. These barren state- 
ments give us but little power of realising the poet's 
life at Cambridge during thirteen years of residence, 
but it is possible to supplement them with certain facts 
and illustrations which enable us to see the progress of 
this delicate spirit through a rough and perilous age. 

The Master of Pembroke, Dr. Benjamin Lany, was 
an old friend of Crashaw's father, and there can be 
little doubt that the boy was sent to that college to 
be under his personal protection. Lany, as far as we 
can collect an impression of his views, was a stout 
Protestant, whose opinions had at one time coincided 
with those of the author of the Bespotted Jesuit^ but 
who now was leaning more and more in a Laudian 
direction, and to whom neither ritual nor a flowery 
poetical diction was distasteful. We really know Dr. 
Lany almost entirely through a copy of English verses 
addressed by him to the elder Crashaw, and through 
another copy of Latin verses addressed to him by the 
younger Crashaw. In the latter he is spoken of as 
one around whom young poets throng with their 
tributes of verse, as '^ the dear guardian of the Pierian 
flock," and as one whose habit it is to encourage 
and guide the children of the Muses. It is, therefore, 
not unlikely that the transition between the grim 
Puritanism of his father's household and the fervid 



Richard Crashaw i6i 

Anglicanism of Cambridge was made easy to the youth 
by the personal character and guidance of Dr. Ben- 
jamin Lany. 

It would be interesting to know whether or not 
Crashaw had begun to compose poetry before going 
up to the University. It is at all events certain that 
he was busy versifying almost immediately on his 
arrival. He was stimulated into the production, or I 
am afraid we must say the manufacture, of an extra- 
ordinary number of exercises, in English and Latin, 
by the death of William Herries, a promising under- 
graduate of his own college, who seems to have died 
rather suddenly in October 1631, when Crashaw had 
been at Cambridge only three months. Four of these 
elegies on a single person pleased their author suf- 
ficiently to be retained by him for a prominent position 
in his Delights of the Muses fifteen years afterwards, 
and others exist and have been printed. Genuine 
grief does not bewail itself with this fluency, or upon 
so many stops, and indeed all these pieces seem to be 
dictated rather by an official than a personal regret. 
It is interesting, however, to find in them that at the 
age of twenty Crashaw already possessed the germ of 
that fine metrical skill and coloured fancy which after- 
wards distinguished him. The extreme vehemence of 
praise, the laudation of this youth for wit, learning, 
piety, and physical beauty, was not calculated to startle 
any one in the seventeenth century, and was probably 
accepted by the entire college, from Dr. Lany down- 
wards, as being the proper and becoming, and indeed 
the only possible tone for a young poet to adopt on a 



1 62 Seventeenth Century Studies 

melancholy occasion of the kind. The alternations of 
life and death are dwelt upon in flowing numbers : — 

" For the laurel in his verse, 
The sullen cypress o'er his hearse ; 
For a silver-crowned head, 
A dirty pillow in death's bed ; 
For so dear, so deep a trust, 
Sad requital, so much dust ! " 

These verses belong to the school of Ben Jonson, 
but with a difference; there is an indefinable touch 
of brightness and colour about them, which may have 
suggested to Crashaw^s college friends the advent of 
a new poet. Moreover, these elegies on Herries are 
valuable to us as belonging certainly to the year 1631, 
when neither Donne, Herbert, nor Habington, although 
well known in private circles, had been brought before 
the world as poets. It is very important to observe 
that Crashaw had already formed the foundation of 
his lyrical style at a time when it is exceedingly 
improbable that he can have read a line of Donne's 
manuscripts. Certain tendencies were in the air, and 
poets in various provinces sounded the same note 
simultaneously and with unconscious unanimity. 

Crashaw's first pubUc appearance was made in a 
little Latin anthology prepared in 1632 to congratulate 
Charles I. on the preservation of his health. Re- 
peatedly, through his college career, he was called 
upon to contribute to those learned garlands of re- 
spectful song which were all remembered against the 
University when that " nest of serpents " fell into the 
hands of the Puritans. In 1634 Crashaw published 



Richard Crashaw 163 

a little volume of his Latin verses, entitled Epigram- 
matuin Sacrorum Liber, following a fashion which 
was already antiquated, and of which John Owen's 
famous collection had been a typical example. One 
of these epigrams contains the celebrated conceit on 
the miracle of the water turned into wine, Lympha 
pudica Deum vidit et erubuit^ which has been very 
felicitously translated — 

" The conscious water saw its God and blushed." 

It would be very interesting, but it is unfortunately 
impossible, to trace the gradual transformation which 
the religious nature of Crashaw underwent. He 
found a very fervid piety maintained by certain young 
men at Cambridge, and he adopted their doctrines 
while surpassing them in zeal. He had already, we 
cannot doubt, passed far from the narrow rigour of 
his father's faith when he came under the influence 
of the saintly Nicholas Ferrar, whose famous com- 
munity at Little Gidding gave a final stamp to his 
character. It is to be lamented that when John Ferrar 
wrote his deeply interesting life of his brother, it did 
not occur to him to give us fuller particulars of Crashaw; 
we must, however, be grateful for what he has given. 
The family of Ferrars and Colletts retired to their 
lonely manor-house of Little Gidding, in Huntingdon- 
shire, in 1625. Nicholas, already thirty- four years of 
age, and weary of a career of action, had determined 
to abandon the world and to adopt a life of pious 
retirement. The " Protestant Nunnery," a name given 
to it in malice by the Puritans, was an establishment 



164 Seventeenth Century Studies 

conducted on purely unaffected principles, and took 
its peculiar colouring slowly and unconsciously, as 
these grave persons, all of one mind, and unopposed 
in their country soHtude, found more and more oppor- 
tunity of following the natural bent of their incHnations. 
Until the beauty of their books and the report of their 
singular devotion had attracted the personal notice of 
the King, the colony at Little Gidding seems to have 
been but little distracted by visitors or perturbed by 
injudicious praise or blame. But the King passed on 
to Cambridge inflamed with the holy loyalty of these 
gentle people, and his subjects in the University woke 
up to the importance of the ritual and the monastic 
seclusion practised at Little Gidding. Those who 
were like-minded contended for the honour of follow- 
ing Nicholas Ferrar from the oratory to the church, 
and from the church to the hospital, in that round of 
devotion and benefaction which made life busy in the 
Protestant Nunnery. 

But it was when Mrs. Ferrar died, in 1635, that 
the saintly Hfe at Gidding reached its final ecstasy 
and fervour. The old lady had watched over the 
physical welfare of the community, and had preserved 
sufficient authority over her son Nicholas to prevent 
him from entirely neglecting what the body craves in 
sleep and food. But her death released him from all 
such obligation, and after the day of her funeral he 
never slept in a bed again, but for the rest of his 
life wrapped himself in a bearskin and lay upon the 
floor, when nature overwhelmed him, and obliged him 
to take brief snatches of sleep between his long prayers 



Richard Crashaw 165 

and vigils. He became more exalted, more unearthly, 
and of course more attractive than ever to those young 
ascetics who, like Crashaw, tried to imitate him in the 
churches and chapels of Cambridge, and who took 
every opportunity of riding over to Little Gidding to 
refresh their faith and passion by intercourse with the 
saintly household. We know that Crashaw was one 
of these, that he was in constant communion with 
Nicholas Ferrar until the death of the latter in the 
winter of 1637, and that, when he could not join in 
the midnight functions at Little Gidding, he would 
emulate the vigils of his teacher by nightly watches 
in the Church of Little St. Mary^s, which was close to 
his new College of Peterhouse. 

If the Civil War had never broken out, it is pro- 
bable that Crashaw would never have left the Anglican 
communion. Nicholas Ferrar, who had sympathies 
for the ritual and even for the dogmas of Rome, such 
as had been unheard of a generation earlier, stayed his 
foot very firmly outside the Papal precincts- He died 
deliberately satisfied with the English forms of faith. 
He had never taken priest's orders, and, what is still 
more strange, it seems that Crashaw never did; but 
the latter took the warmest interest in ecclesiastical 
affairs, and was one of those who clamoured most 
importunately for the restoration of the college chapel 
of Peterhouse, which was performed during his fellow- 
ship. And when no longer he was forced at midnight 
to cross the college bounds and enter the neighbouring 
chancel of Little St. Mary's, there can be no doubt 
that he spent more hours than ever in prayer under 



1 66 Seventeenth Century Studies 

the shadow of the great gold angels of Peterhouse 
Chapel, and among the hundred saints and cherubs, 
with ''God the Father in a chair, holding a glass in 
His hand," which formed part of the ancient ornament 
of this splendid building. 

There, in a trance of orison, with the rich notes of 
the organ pouring upon him and the light from the 
antique windows surrounding him, the Puritan Com- 
mission found him unaware. On December 21, 1643, 
Mr. Horscot and his soldiers sacked the chapel of 
Peterhouse, pulling down the images and breaking the 
windows. This was but a local realisation of the 
universal fact that the reign of Laudian ceremonial 
was over. Laud himself was executed a year later, 
and the very foundations of Episcopacy in England 
were shaken. Cambridge formed a helpless island in 
a sea of Puritan counties, and in the summer of 1644 
the Earl of Manchester, on his way to the siege of 
York, lingered in the eastern University long enough 
to hold out the alternative of the Covenant or of ejection 
to every Master and Fellow. On June 1 1 five Fellows 
of Peterhouse, Crashaw and Beaumont being two of 
them, were forcibly driven out, and five Puritans 
appointed in their place. 

The Fellows were scattered in all directions. Beau- 
mont, even then engaged upon his High Church epic 
of Psyche^ lamented, in a passage which Dr. Grosart 
was the first to point out, that his friend was not by 
his side to revise it. It seems probable that Crashaw 
proceeded at once to Oxford, where the King was still 
for a few months undisturbed. It is at least natural 



Richard Crashaw 167 

that he should have done so, since in 164 1 he had 
been incorporated a member of the sister University, 
and had been that year in residence at Oxford. It 
may even be conjectured that the events which 
followed the execution of Strafford so terrified the 
timid scholar that he removed to the western and more 
loyal University, and was ejected from Peterhouse 
during his absence. However this may be, his posi- 
tion must have become desperate soon after 1644, and 
he may even have been concealed at Newnham Paddox 
by his friends, the Earl and Countess of Denbigh, 
until the defeat at Naseby finally overwhelmed the 
Royalist party in ruin. It was at this time that the 
poet seemed to have entered the Catholic Church. His 
religious nature possessed what Milton calls ''a fugi- 
tive and cloistered virtue ; " to him it must have seemed 
that the English ritual was destroyed, its bishops 
scattered, its creed disused, and its authority ridiculed ; 
and from the face of anarchy this shrinking soul fled 
to the staunch and conservative arms of Rome. He 
had long been meditating the possibility of this step^ 
although very probably it was forced upon him at last 
harshly and suddenly. Cowley, who was always a 
sincere Anglican, refers to his friend's conversion to 
Rome with a charming tact and delicacy : — 

" Pardon, my mother Church, if I consent 
That angels led him when from thee he went ; 
For even in error sure no danger is 
When joined with so much piety as his. 
Ah ! mighty God, with shame I speak't, and grief ; 
Ah 1 that our greatest faults were in belief!" 



1 68 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Regarding the sanctity and single-heartedness of 
the unfortunate Crashaw there is but one testimony. 
The only dissentient voice is that of the harsh and 
ribald Prj^nne, whose accusation is a eulogy. And 
now, having attempted to conduct the sacred poet to 
the great crises of his life, let us leave him there for a 
while, and consider those poems which his first editor 
tells us were written beneath the wings of God, when 
Crashaw lodged under '^Tertulhan^s roof of angels at 
Peterhouse, where he made his nest more gladly than 
David's swallow near the house of God, and, like a 
primitive saint, offered more prayers in the night than 
others usually offer in the day." 

Crashaw's English poems were first published in 
1646, soon after his arrival in Paris. He was at that 
time in his thirty-fourth year, and the volume contains 
his best and most mature as well as his crudest pieces. 
It is, indeed, a collection of juvenile and manly verses 
thrown together with scarcely a hint of arrangement, 
the uncriticised labour of fifteen years. The title is 
Steps to the Temple^ Sacred Poems ^ with other delights 
of the Muses, The sacred poems are so styled by his 
anonymous editor because they are '^ steps for happy 
souls to climb heaven by ; '' the Delights of the Muses 
are entirely secular, and the two divisions of the book, 
therefore, reverse the order of Herrick's similarly 
edited Hesperides and Noble Numbers, The Steps to 
the Temple are distinguished at once from the collec- 
tion with which it is most natural to compare them, 
the Temple of Herbert, to which their title refers with 
a characteristic touch of modesty, by the fact that they 



Richard Crashaw 169 

are not poems of experience, but of ecstasy — not of 
meditation, but of devotion. Herbert, and with him 
most of the sacred poets of the age, are autobiographi- 
cal ; they analyse their emotions, they take themselves 
to task, they record their struggles, their defeats, their 
consolation. 

But if the azure cherubim of introspection are the 
dominant muses of English sacred verse, the flame- 
coloured seraph of worship reigns in that of Crashaw. 
He has made himself familiar with all the amorous 
phraseology of the Catholic metaphysicians; he has 
read the passionate canticles of St. John of the Cross, 
the books of the Carmelite nun, St. Teresa, and all 
the other rosy and fiery contributions to ecclesiastical 
literature laid by Spain at the feet of the Pope during 
the closing decades of the sixteenth century. The 
virginal courage and ardour of St. Teresa inspire 
Crashaw with his loveliest and most faultless verses. 
We need not share nor even sympathise with the 
sentiment of such lines as these to acknowledge that 
they belong to the highest order of lyric writing : — 

" Thou art Love's victim, and must die 
A death more mystical and high ; 
Into Love's arms thou shalt let fall 
A still-surviving funeral. 
His is the dart must make thy death, 
Whose stroke will taste thy hallowed breath — 
A dart thrice dipped in that rich flame 
Which writes thy spouse's radiant name 
Upon the roof of heaven, where aye 
It shines and with a sovereign ray * 

Beats bright upon the burning faces 
Of souls which in that name's sweet graces 



lyo Seventeenth Century Studies 

Find everlasting smiles. So rare, 
So spiritual, pure, and fair, 
Must be the immortal instrument 
Upon whose choice point shall be spent 
A life so loved ; and that there be 
Fit executioners for thee. 
The fairest first-born sons of fire, 
Blest seraphim, shall leave their choir, 
And turn Love's soldiers, upon thee 
To exercise their archery." 

r Nor in the poem from which these lines are quoted 

j does this melodious rapture flag during nearly two 

/ hundred verses. But such a sustained flight is rare, 

I as in the similar poem of *' The Flaming Heart," also 

I addressed to St. Teresa, where, after a long prelude 

of frigid and tuneless conceits, it is only at the very 

close that the poet suddenly strikes upon this golden 

chord of ecstasy : — 

" Let all thy scattered shafts of light, that play 
Among the leaves of thy large books of day. 
Combined against this breast at once break in. 
And take away from me myself and sin ; 
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be. 
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. 
O thou undaunted daughter of desires ! 

By all thy dower of lights and fires. 

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove. 

By all thy lives and deaths of love. 

By thy large draughts of intellectual day. 
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they, 
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire. 
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire. 
By the full kingdom of that final kiss 
That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His ; 



Richard Crashaw 171 

By all the heaven thou hast in Him, 
Fair sister of the seraphim ! 
By all of thine we have in thee — 
Leave nothing of myself in me ; 
Let me so read thy life that I 
Unto all life of mine may die." 

If Crashaw had left us nothing more than these two 
fragments, we should be able to distinguish him by 
them among English poets. He is the solitary repre-'' 
sentative of the poetry of Catholic psychology which 
England possessed until our own days ; and Germany 
has one no less unique in Friedrich Spe. I do not 
know that any critic has compared Spe and Crashaw, 
but they throw lights upon the genius of one another 
which may seasonably detain us for a while. The 
great Cathohc poet of Germany during the seventeenth 
century was born in 1591. Like Crashaw, he was 
set in motion by the Spanish Mystics; like him, he 
stood on the verge of a great poetical revolution with- 
out being in the least affected by it. To Waller and 
to Opitz, with their new dry systems of precise 
prosody, Crashaw and Spe owed nothing; they were 
purely romantic and emotional in style. Spe was 
born a Catholic, spent all his life among the Jesuits, 
and died, worn out with good works and immortalised 
by an heroic struggle against the system of perse- 
cution for witchcraft, in the hospital of Treves in 
1635, just when Crashaw was becoming enthralled by 
the delicious mysteries of Little Gidding. Both of 
them wrote Jesuit eclogues. In Spe the shepherd 
winds his five best roses into a garland for the infant 



172 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Jesus ; in Crashaw he entertains the '' starry stranger" 
with conceits about his diamond eyes and the red 
leaves of his lips. In each poet there is an hysterical 
delight in blood and in the details of martyrdom, in 
each a shrill and frantic falsetto that jars on the 
modern ear, in each a sweetness of diction and purity 
of fancy that redeem a hundred faults.^ The poems 
of Spe, entitled Trutz-Nachtigal^ were first printed in 
1649, the year that Crashaw died. 

The chief distinction between Spe and Crashaw is, 
in the first place, that Crashaw is by far the greater 
and more varied of the two as regards poetical gifts, 
and, secondly, that while Spe was inspired by the 
national Volkslied, and introduced its effects into his 
song, Crashaw was an adept in every refinement of 
metrical structure which had been invented by the 
poet-artists of England, Spain, and Italy. The pro- 
gress of our poetical literature in the seventeenth 
century will never be thoroughly explained until some 
competent scholar shall examine the influence of 

^ As an illustration of almost all these qualities, and as a specimen 
of Spe's metrical gifts, I give one stanza from the Trutz- Nachtigal : — 
'^ Aus der Seiten 
Lan sich leiten 

Rote Strahlen wie Korall ; 
Aus der Seiten 
Lan sich leiten 

Weisse Wasser wie Krystal ! 
O du reines, 
Hubsch und feines 

Bachlein von Korall und Glas, 
Nit noch weiche, 
Nit entschleiche, 

O Rubin und Perlengass ! " 



Richard Crashaw 173 

Spanish poetry upon our own. This influence seems 
to be particularly strong in the case of Donne, and in 
the next generation in that of Crashaw. I am not 
sufficiently familiar with Spanish poetry to give an 
opinion on this subject which is of much value ; 
but as I write I have open before me the works of 
Gongora, and I find in the general disposition of 
his Octavas Sacras and in the style of his Canciones 
resemblances to the staves introduced to us by 
Crashaw which can scarcely be accidental. 

Mr. Shorthouse reminds me that Ferrar was much 
in Spain; we know that Crashaw ''was excellent in 
Italian and Spanish," and we are thus led on to 
consider the more obvious debt which he owed to the 
contemporary poetry of Italy. One of the largest 
pieces of work which he undertook was the translation 
of the first canto of the Strage degli Innocently or 
^^ Massacre of the Innocents," a famous poem by the 
Neapolitan Cavaliere Marini, who had died in 1625. 
Crashaw has thrown a great deal of dignity and fancy 
into this version, which, however, outdoes the original 
in ingenious illustration, as the true Marinists, such 
as Achillini, outdid Marini in their conceited sonnets. 
Crashaw, in fact, is a genuine Marinist, the happiest 
specimen which we possess in English, for he pre- 
serves a high level of fantastic foppery, and seldom, 
at his worst, sinks to those crude animal imagings — 
illustrations from food, for instance — which occasion- 
ally make such writers as Habington and Carew not 
merely ridiculous but repulsive. 

In criticising with severity the piece on Mary 



174 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Magdalene which stands in the forefront of Crashaw^s 
poems, and bears the title of '' The Weeper," I have 
the misfortune to find myself at variance with most of 
his admirers. I cannot, however, avoid the conviction 
that the obtrusion of this eccentric piece on the thresh- 
old of his shrine has driven away from it many a 
would-be worshipper. If language be ever liable to 
abuse in the hands of a clever poet, it is surely out- 
raged here. Every extravagant and inappropriate 
image is dragged to do service to this small idea — 
namely, that the Magdalen is for ever weeping. Her 
eyes, therefore, are sister springs, parents of rills, 
thawing crystal, hills of snow, heavens of ever-falling 
stars, eternal breakfasts for brisk cherubs, sweating 
boughs of balsam, nests of milky doves, a voluntary 
mint of silver, and Heaven knows how many more 
incongruous objects, from one to another of which 
the labouring fancy flits in despair and bewilder- 
ment. In this poem all is resigned to ingenuity ; we 
are not moved or softened, we are merely startled, 
and the irritated reader is at last appeased for the 
fatigues he has endured by a frank guffaw, when he 
sees the poet, at his wits' end for a simile, plunge 
into the abyss of absurdity, and style the eyes of the 
Magdalen 

" Two walking baths, two weeping motions, 
Portable and compendious oceans." 

These are the worst lines in Crashaw. They are 
perhaps the worst in all English poetry, but they must 
not be omitted here, since they indicate to us the 



Richard Crashaw 175 

principal danger to which not he only but most of his 
compeers were liable. It was from the tendency to 
call a pair of eyes '' portable and compendious oceans " 
that Waller and Dryden, after both of them stumbling 
on the same stone in their youth, finally delivered us. 
It is useless to linger with indulgence over the stanzas 
of a poem like *^ The Weeper," simply because many 
of the images are in themselves pretty. The system 
upon which these juvenile pieces of Crashaw are 
written is in itself indefensible, and is founded upon 
what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls an '' incurable defect 
of style." 

Crashaw, however, possesses style, or he would not 
deserve the eminent place he holds among our poets. 
The ode in praise of Teresa, written while the author 
was still among the Protestants, and therefore pro- 
bably about 1642, has already been cited here. It is 
an exquisite composition, full of real vision, music of 
the most delicate order, and imagery which, although 
very profuse and ornate, is always subordinated to 
the moral meaning and to the progress of the poem. 
The ^* Shepherd's Hymn," too, is truly ingenious and 
graceful, with its pretty pastoral tenderness. '*On 
Mr. G. Herbert^s Book sent to a Gentleman " evidently 
belongs to the St. Teresa period, and contains the 
same charm. The lyrical epistle persuading the 
Countess of Denbigh to join the Roman communion 
contains extraordinary felicities, and seems throbbing 
with tenderness and passion. We have already drawn 
attention to the splendid close of ''The Flaming Heart." 
There is perhaps no other of the sacred poems in the 



176 Seventeenth Century Studies 

volume of 1646 which can be commended in its en- 
tirety. Hardly one but contains felicities ; the dullest 
is brightened by such flashes of genius as — 

*' Lo, how the thirsty lands 
Gasp for the golden showers with long- stretched hands !" 

But the poems are hard, dull, and laborious, the 
exercises of a saint indeed, but untouched by inspira- 
tion, human or divine. We have to return to the in- 
comparable ^' Hymn to St. Teresa '' to remind ourselves 
of what heights this poet was capable. 

There can be very little doubt that Crashaw regarded 
the second section of his book, the secular Delights of 
the Muses J as far inferior in value and importance to 
the Steps to the Temple, That is not, however, a view 
in which the modern reader can coincide, and it is 
rather the ingenuity of his human poems than the 
passion of his divine which has given him a prominent 
place among poets. The Delights open with the 
celebrated piece called the ** Muse's Duel," paraphrased 
from the Latin of Strada. As one frequently sees a 
reference to the *^ Latin poet Strada,'^ it may be worth 
while to remark that Famianus Strada was not a poet 
at all, but a lecturer in the Jesuit colleges. He be- 
longed to Crashaw^s own age, having been born in 
1572, and dying in the year of the English poet's 
death, 1649. The piece on the rivalry of the musician 
and the nightingale was published first at Rome in 
16 1 7, in a volume of Prolusiones on rhetoric and 
poetry, and occurs in the sixth lecture of the second 
course on poetic style. The Jesuit rhetorician has 



Richard Crashaw 177 

been trying to familiarise his pupils with the style of 
the great classic poets by reciting to them passages 
in imitation of Ovid, Lucretius, Lucan, and the rest, 
and at last he comes to Claudian. This, he says, is 
an imitation of the style of Claudian, and so he gives 
us the lines which have become so famous. That 
a single fragment in a school-book should suddenly 
take root and blossom in European literature, when 
all else that its voluminous author wrote and said 
was promptly forgotten, is very curious, but not un- 
precedented. 

In England the first person who adopted or adapted 
Strada^s exercise was John Ford, in his play of The 
Lover's Melancholy ^ in 1629. Dr. Grosart found 
another early version among the Lansdowne MSS., 
and Ambrose Phillips a century later essayed it. 
There are numerous references to it in other litera- 
tures than ours, and in the present age M. Francois 
Coppee has introduced it with charming effect into 
his pretty comedy oi Le Luthier de Cremone. Thus 
the schoolmaster^s task, set as a guide to the manner 
of Claudian, has achieved, by an odd irony of for- 
tune, a far more general and lasting success than 
any of the actual verses of that elegant writer. 
With regard to the comparative merits of Ford's 
version, which is in blank verse, and of Crashaw's, 
which is in rhyme, a confident opinion has generally 
been expressed in favour of the particular poet under 
consideration at the moment ; nor is Lamb him- 
self superior to this amiable partiahty. He denies 
that Crashaw's version ''can at all compare for 

M 



178 Seventeenth Century Studies 

harmony and grace with this blank verse of Ford's." 
But my own view coincides much rather with that of 
Mr. Swinburne, who says that '* between the two 
beautiful versions of Strada's pretty fable by Ford 
and Crashaw, there will always be a diversity of judg- 
ment among readers ; some must naturally prefer the 
tender fluency and limpid sweetness of Ford, others 
the dazzling intricacy and afQuence in refinements, the 
supple and cunning implication, the choiceness and 
subtlety of Crashaw." Mr. Shorthouse, on the other 
hand, suggests to me that '^ Crashaw's poem is surely 
so much more full and elaborate, that it must be 
acknowledged to be the more important effort." There 
can be no doubt that it presents us with the most 
brilliant and unique attempt which has been made in 
our language to express the very quality and variety 
of musical notation in words. It may be added that 
the only reference made by Crashaw in any part of 
his writings to any of the dramatists his contemporaries 
is found in a couplet addressed to Ford : — 

" Thou cheat'st us, Ford, mak'st one seem two by art ; 
What is love's sacrifice but the broken heart f^^ 

After ^* Music's Duel," the best-known poem of 
Crashaw's is his ''Wishes to his Supposed Mistress," 
a piece in forty-two stanzas, which Mr. Palgrave 
reduced to twenty-one in his Golden Treasury, He 
neglected to mention the "sweet theft," and accord- 
ingly most readers know the poem only as he re- 
duced and rearranged it. The act was bold, perhaps, 
but I think that it was judicious. As Crashaw left 



Richard Crashaw 179 

it, the poem extends beyond the Hmits of a lyric, 
tediously repeats its sentiments, and gains neither 
in force nor charm by its extreme length. In Mr. 
Palgrave's selection it challenges comparison with 
the loveliest and most original pieces of the century. 
It never, I think, rises to the thrilling tenderness which 
Donne is capable of on similar occasions. Crashaw 
never pants out a line and a half which leave us 
faint and throbbing, as if the heart of humanity 
itself had been revealed to us for a moment; with 
all his flying colour and lambent flame, Crashaw is 
not Donne. But the ^' Wishes " is more than a charm- 
ing, it is a fascinating poem, the pure dream of the 
visionary poet, who liked to reflect that he too might 
marry if he would, and choose a godly bride. He 
calls upon her — 

" Whoe'er she be 
That not impossible She 
That shall command my heart and me ; 

Where'er she lie 

Locked up from mortal eye 

In shady leaves of destiny " — 

to receive the embassy of his wishes, bound to in- 
struct her in that higher beauty of the spirit which his 
soul demands — 

'* Something more than 
Taffata or tissue can, 
Or rampant feather, or rich fan." 

But what he requires is not spiritual adornment alone ; 



i8o Seventeenth Century Studies 

he will have her courteous and accomplished in the 
world's ways also, the possessor of 

" Sydneian showers 
Of sweet discourse, whose powers 
Can crown old Winter's head with flowers ; " 

and finally, 

" Life, that dares send 
A challenge to his end, 
And when it comes say, ' Welcome, friend.' 

I wish her store 

Of worth may leave her poor 

Of wishes ; and I wish — no more." 

The same refined and tender spirit animates the 
^^ Epitaph upon Husband and Wife, who died and 
were buried together." The lovely rambling verses 
of ''To the Morning, in satisfaction for Sleep," are 
perhaps more in the early manner of Keats than any 
other English lines. In some of those sacred poems 
which we have lately been considering, he reminds us 
no less vividly of Shelley, and there are not a few 
passages of Crashaw which it would require a very 
quick ear to distinguish from Mr. Swinburne. We 
may safely conjecture that the latter poet^s *' Song in 
Season " was written in deliberate rivalry of that song 
of Crashaw's which runs — 

" O deliver 

Love his quiver ; 
From thine eyes he shoots his arrows, 

Where Apollo 

Cannot follow. 
Feathered with his mother's sparrows." 



Richard Crashaw i8i 

But perhaps the sweetest and most modern of all 
Crashaw's secular lyrics is that entitled Love's Horo- 
scope. The phraseology of the black art was never 
used with so sweet and picturesque an ingenuity, and 
the piece contains some of the most delicately musical 
cadences to be found in the poetry of the age : — 

" Thou know'st a face in whose each look 
Beauty lays ope Love's fortune-book, 
On whose fair revolutions wait 
The obsequious motions of Love's fate. 
Ah ! my heart ! her eyes and she 
Have taught thee new astrology. 
Howe'er Love's native hours were set, 
Whatever starry synod met, 
'Tis in the mercy of her eye 
If poor Love shall live or die." 

It is probable from internal and from external evi- 
dence also that all these secular poems belong to 
Crashaw^s early years at Cambridge. The pretty lines 
*^ On Two Green Apricocks sent to Cowley by Sir 
Crashaw" evidently date from 1633; the various 
elegies and poems of compliment can be traced to 
years ranging from 163 1 to 1634. It is doubtful 
whether the *^ Wishes" themselves are at all later 
than this. Even regarding him as a finished poet ten 
years before the publication of his book, however, he 
comes late in the list of seventeenth century lyrists, 
and has no claims to be considered as an innovator. 
He owed all the basis of his style, as has been already 
hinted, to Donne and to Ben Jonson. His originality^ 
was one of treatment and technique ; he forged a 
more rapid and brilliant short line than any of his 



1 82 Seventeenth Century Studies 



predecessors had done, and for brief intervals and along 
sudden paths of his own he carried English prosody to 
a higher refinement, a more glittering felicity, than it 
had ever achieved. Thus, in spite of his conceits and 
his romantic colouring, he points the way for Pope, 
who did not disdain to borrow from him freely. 

It is unfortunate that Crashaw is so unequal as to 
be positively delusive ; he bafQes analysis by his un- 
certain hold upon style, and in spite of his charm and 
his genius is perhaps most interesting to us because 
of the faults he shares with purely modern poets. It 
would scarcely be unjust to say that Crashaw was the 
first real poet who allowed himself to use a splendid 
phrase when a simple one would have better expressed 
his meaning; and in an age when all but the best 
poetry was apt to be obscure, crabbed, and rugged, 
he introduces a new fault, that of being visionary and 
diffuse, with a deliberate intention not only, as the 
others did, to deck Nature out in false ornament, but 
to represent her actual condition as being something 
more '* starry " and '* seraphical '^ than it really is. His 
style has hectic beauties that delight us, but evade us 
also, and colours that fade as promptly as the scarlet 
and the amber in a sunset sky. We can describe himi 
best in negatives ; he is not so warm and real as \ 
Herrick, nor so drily intellectual as the other hymnists, ( 
nor coldly and respectably virile like Cowley. To use 
an odd simile of Shelley's, he sells us gin when the 
other poets offer us legs of mutton, or at all events 
baskets of bread and vegetables. 

Crashaw now disappeared from the circle of his 



Richard Crashaw 183 

friends. Joseph Beaumont, preparing his epic for the 
press in his retirement at Hadleigh, knew not where 
to turn for advice, and sighed to think how 

" Fair had my Psyche been had she at first 
By thy judicious hand been dressed and nursed." 

But to US the movements of this spiritual luminary are 
somewhat more obvious. 

After the birth of the future Duchess of Orleans in 
1644, Queen Henrietta Maria fled to Paris, and held 
a kind of court there for the benefit of her husband^s 
cause. The poet Cowley was her secretary, and seems 
to have introduced Crashaw to her. Tradition says 
that the younger poet found the elder in great poverty 
in Paris, and that his good offices with the Queen 
enabled him to secure for Crashaw one of the last 
fragments of preferment yet clinging about exiled 
majesty. To a fellow-CathoHc Henrietta Maria could 
still offer an introduction to Roman society, and it is 
said that she gave the poet a letter to Cardinal J. B. 
Pallotta, then the Governor of Rome, a post to which 
he had been raised, in the flower of his age, by Pope 
Urban VIII. Pallotta was a man of force and ambition, 
feared as much as honoured for the extreme severity 
of his morals. His influence over Innocent X. was so 
considerable and so salutary that he was himself talked 
of as a possible successor to the tiara. This man, as 
Canon Bargrave recounts in his Pope and College of 
Cardinals in 1660, offered Crashaw the post of private 
secretary to himself, which the poet seems to have 
held for about two years. 



184 Seventeenth Century Studies 

In the vivid pages of the close of John Inglesant 
the reader will find a very correct and stirring picture 
of the condition of the Holy City some six years after 
Crashaw's departure from it. He will easily realise, 
from that description, that although Rome had purged 
itself from its most crying scandals of a hundred years 
before, its society was far from being calculated to 
soothe or delight the soul of a chaste mystic, who had 
seen no ruder side of life than was to be found in the 
quiet hall of Peterhouse or the saintly society of Little 
Gidding. His soul burned within him because of the 
wickedness of the servants of the Cardinal, and at 
last, like Joseph, he felt constrained to bring their 
evil report to his father in God. We hear from Bar- 
grave, who was in Rome at the time, in common with 
several of the exiled Fellows of Peterhouse, that Pallotta 
took the hint and chastised his followers, whereupon 
they in revenge threatened to take Crashaw^s life. 
The Cardinal, who came from Ancona, bethought him 
of the neighbouring sanctuary of Loreto, of which he 
was himself the patron, and on April 24, 1649, he 
procured for the poet a small benefice in the famous 
Basilica Church of Our Lad}^ 

We can imagine with what feelings of rapture and 
content the world-worn poet crossed the Apennines 
and descended to the dry little town above the shores 
of the Adriatic, in which he doubtless pictured to 
himself a haunt of peace and prayer till his lifers 
end. As he ascended the last hill, and saw before 
him the magnificent basilica which. Bramante had built 
as a shelter for the Holy House, he would feel that 



Richard Crashaw 185 

his feet were indeed upon the threshold of his rest. 
With what joy, with what a beating heart, he would 
long to see that very Santa Casa, the cottage built 
of brick, which angels lifted from Nazareth out of 
the black hands of the Saracen, and gently dropped 
among the nightingales in the forest of Loreto on 
that mystic night of the year 1294! There, like a 
child^s bare body wrapped in the velvets and naperies 
of a princely cradle, the humble Casa lay in the marble 
enclosure which Sansovino had made for it, and there 
through the barbaric brickwork window in the Holy 
Chimney he could see, in a trance of wonder, the 
gilded head of Madonna^s cedarn image that St. Luke 
the Evangelist had carved with his own hands. Here 
indeed a delicious life seemed planned for Crashaw — 
to minister all day in the rich incense ; to touch the 
very raiment of Our Lady, stiff with pearls and rubies 
to the feet ; to trim the golden lamps, the offerings 
of the kings of the whole Catholic world; to pass 
in and out between the golden cherubim and brazen 
seraphim; to cleanse the mosaics of lapis-lazuli, and 
to polish the silver bas-reliefs till they shouted the 
story of the magic flight from Nazareth. There, in 
the very house of Jesus, to hear the noise and mutter 
of the officiating priest, the bustle of canons, chaplains, 
monks, and deacons, the shrill sweet voices of the 
acolytes singing all day long — this must have seemed 
the very end of life and beginning of heaven to the 
mystical and sensuous Crashaw. 

It appears, however, that his joys were brief. In 
August 1649, four months after his appointment, his 



1 86 Seventeenth Century Studies 

benefice had passed into other hands, and we learn 
from Bargrave that he died a few weeks after he 
arrived at Loreto, not without suspicion of having been 
poisoned by those whom he had denounced to Cardinal 
Pallotta. He seems to have been in his thirty-seventh 
year. Cowley composed a lovely elegy for his funeral, 
promising him an immortality which he has in some 
sort achieved. He was a good man and a gentleman, 
an extreme instance of a remarkable type, and the 
only one of all the English divine poets of the century 
whose temperament drove him actually within the pre- 
cincts of Rome. 

1882. 



Too often it is with regret, or with a grudged esteem, 
that we hail newly-discovered works by standard 
authors. The best writing generally takes care of 
itself, and is remembered and preserved, whatever may 
be lost. The first sprightly running is commonly the 
best, and editors scarcely earn our thanks by troubling 
the lees for us. For once we have an exception before 
us. The pamphlet of newly-discovered poems by 
Crashaw which Dr. Grosart forwarded to his sub- 
scribers in 1888 contains some things which, even in 
the congested condition of our national literature, are 
never likely to be obscured again. The British Museum 
bought from a bookseller, who had picked it up as an 
odd lot at Sotheby's or Puttick & Simpson's, a MS. 
volume of Crashaw's poems, indubitably, as would 



Richard Crashaw 187 

appear, in his own, previously untraced, handwriting. 
Dr. Grosart gives us an example of the latter in fac- 
simile, selecting the page which contains the well-known 
epigram on '* The Water being made Wine." 

We turn at once to the poems which are entirely 
new. Here is one apparently intended to form the 
dedication to a gift-volume of the poet^s Steps to the 
Temple : — 

" At the ivory tribunal of your hand, 
Fair one, these tender leaves do trembling stand. 
Knowing 'tis in the doom of your sweet eye 
Whether the Muse they clothe shall live or die ; 
Live she or die to Fame, each leaf you meet 
Is her life's wing, or else her winding-sheet." 

We could swear this was Crashaw if we picked it 
up anonymous on Pitcairn's Island. Moreover, some- 
thing very like the second couplet is to be found already 
in Lovers Horoscope : — 

" 'Tis in the mercy of her eye 
If poor Love shall live or die." 

It is very pretty. But this, a nameless lyric, is more 
than pretty; it is exquisite, and in Crashaw's most 
transcendental manner : — 

" Though now 'tis neither May nor June, 
And nightingales are out of tune. 
Yet in these leaves, fair One, there lies 
(Sworn servant to your sweetest eyes) 
A nightingale, who, may she spread 
In your white bosom her chaste bed, 
Spite of all the maiden snow 
Those pure untrodden paths can show, 



1 88 Seventeenth Century Studies 

You straight shall see her wake and rise, 
Taking fresh life from your fair eyes, 
And with claspt wings proclaim a spring, 
Where Love and she shall sit and sing ; 
For lodged so near your sweetest throat 
What nightingale can lose her note ? 
Nor let her kindred birds complain 
Because she breaks the year's old reign ; 
For let them know she's none of those 
Hedge-quiristers whose music owes 
Only such strains as serve to keep 
Sad shades, and sing dull night asleep. 
No, she's a priestess of that grove, 
The holy chapel of chaste love, 
Your virgin bosom. Then whate'er 
Poor laws divide the public year, 
Whose revolutions wait upon 
The wild turns of the wanton sun. 
Be you the Lady of Love's year, 
Where your eyes shine his suns appear, 
There all the year is Love's long Spring, 

There all the year 
Love's nightingales shall sit and sing.'' 

The break in the penultimate verse is a charming 
addition to the melody, and I am very much mistaken 
if this lyric does not take its place among the best of 
Charles L's reign. 

The remainder of the new poems are religious, and 
they are not in Crashaw^s very finest manner. *' To 
Pontius, Washing his Blood-stained Hands/^ is a typical 
example of the monstrous chains of conceits which these 
most unequal poets were at any moment liable to pro- 
duce. The face of Pilate was originally a nymph — 

" The daughter of a fair and well-famed fountain 
As ever silver-tipped the side of shady mountain,'' — 



Richard Crashaw 189 

(in itself a charming image) ; this nymph has suffered 
the fate of Philomela from this new Tereus, the hand 
of Pilate, and '^ appears nothing but tears." A para- 
phrase of Grotius gives us a first version of the well- 
known verse on the Eucharist : — 

" The water blushed and started into wine." 

We trace the great Crashaw of the fiery surprises 
but seldom in this long, tame, and somewhat crabbed 
poem; but he asserts himself in a few such phrases 
as this : — 

" Before the infant shrine 

Of my weak feet, the Persian Magi lay, 

And left their mithra for my star ; '' 

and this, which well describes the condition of Cra- 
shaw^s muse : — 

" A sweet inebriated ecstasy." 

The new readings of old poems which the MS. gives 
are neither, it would seem, very numerous nor very 
important. ''The Weeper'' is such a distressing, 
indeed such a humihating poem, that we receive a 
new stanza of it with indifference ; we may note one 
novelty, — this string of preposterous conceits on the 
tears of the Magdalen must in future close with a con- 
ceit that swallows up all the rest : — 

" Of such fair floods as this 
Heaven the crystal ocean is." 

Dr. Grosart takes this opportunity of recording an 
interesting little discovery. Crashaw's important Latin 



190 Seventeenth Century Studies 

poem ''Bulla'' is found to have made its first appear- 
ance in a very rare Cambridge volume, the Crepundia 
Siliana of Heynsius, in 1646, two years after the poet's 
ejection from his Fellowship. It appeared the same 
year in the Delights of the Muses^ with a considerable 
number of variations of the text. It is a pity that 
Crashaw did not write ** Bulla " in English, for it is 
full of the characteristics of his style. 



ABRAHAM COWLEY 

THE period of English poetry which lies between 
the decline of Ben Jonson and the rise of Dryden I 
was ruled with undisputed sway by a man whose \ 
works are now as little read as those of any fifth-rate ^ 
Elizabethan dramatist. During the whole lifetime of 
Milton, the fame of that glorious poet was obscured 
and dwarfed by the exaggerated reputation of this 
writer ; and so general and so unshaken was the belief 
in the lyrist of the day, that a Royalist gentleman of 
Cambridge or an exiled courtier at Paris in the year 
1650 would have laughed in your face had you sug- t 
gested that time could ever wither the deathless laurels I 
of Mr. Cowley, or untune the harmonies of his majestic 
numbers. Yet in a very short space this work of de- 
struction was most thoroughly done. The generation 1 
of Dryden admired his genius passionately, but not | 
without criticism. The generation of Pope praised | 
him coldly, but without reading him, and within fifty 
years of his own decease this nonpareil of the Re- 
storation fell into total disfavour and oblivion. With 
the revival of naturalistic poetry, the lyrists and 
dramatists of the reign of Charles I. came once more 
into favour. Crashaw, Quarles, Lovelace, martyrs, 

pietists, and rakes, all the true children of the Muses, 

191 



192 Seventeenth Century Studies 

whatever their mode or matter, were restored and 
reprinted. 

Not these only, but some very small and unattractive 
talents have lately been presented anew to the public ; 
but Cowley, the one representative genius of the age, 
as his contemporaries supposed, still lacked an editor 
who would collect his scattered works and give him 
the chance of a new lease of life, until in 1881 the 
Rev. A. B. Grosart issued his privately printed edition 
in two 4to volumes, one of the best of his many 
valuable pubHcations. Cowley's prose essays, it must 
be acknowledged, have held their ground in our litera- 
ture, but as a poet he is a dead name, or living only 
in depreciation and ridicule. We hope to show that, 
however great his faults, this depreciation is unjust 
and this ridicule absurd, and in doing so it will 
be necessary to solve two questions — why Cowley 
ever attained so immense a poetic reputation, and 
why, having once gained it, he has so completely 
lost it. 

A wealthy citizen of London, stationer or grocer, 
dying in the summer of 16 1 8, left, besides ample 
provision for his widow, a sum of ;;^ 1000 to be divided 
among his six children and one other not yet born. 
In the autumn of the year this latter heir appeared, 
and was christened Abraham Cowley. We, looking 
back upon the history of the time, see that it was a 
period of rapid poetic decadence into which this baby 
was born. Shakespeare was dead ; Jonson and the 
philosophic poets, to whom the newly awakened brain 
was to be so intimately indebted, were already past 



Abraham Cowley 193 

middle life. The years directly after the birth of 
Cowley were to be darkened by the deaths of many 
poets, but none were to be born, except Marvell, 
Vaughan, and, much later, Dryden, for nearly forty 
years. Of his immediate compeers, Milton was ten 
years of age, Denham three, Suckling nine years, and 
Lovelace only a few weeks older than himself. 

We know nothing of his early childhood but what 
he has himself told us with a charming simplicity — 
namely that his mother's parlour was full of works of 
devotion, among which he was so fortunate as to find 
a copy of the Faery Queen. This became his con- 
tinual reading, and, without much understanding of 
the matter, he became so interpenetrated with the 
delicious recurrence of the rhyme and rhythm that he 
insensibly was made a poet. Before he was twelve 
years old he had read the entire works of Spenser. 
So much he himself tells us, but there can be no doubt 
to those who study his earliest writings that the magic 
of another name was added to the charm that woke 
him into verse. At ten years of age, the child com-i 
posed an epical romance of Pyramus and Thisbe^ which | 
is one of the most extraordinary instances of precocity 
in the whole annals of literature. Indeed, to find a 
parallel to it, we must leave the art of poetry alto- I 
gether, and note what was done by Mozart in music^ ' 
or Lucas van Ley den in engraving. But this was 
but the prelude to fresh infantine exertions. The 
precocious boy was very early sent to Westminster 
School, and his intense interest in versification and 
the grace and charm of his manners won him many 

N 



\ 



194 Seventeenth Century Studies 

friends and patrons. To his schoolfellows he might 
well seem the prodigy that we know they considered 
him; and the masters of the school, with a gentleness 
unusual in those austerer times, encouraged his con- 
tinued production of verses. In 1630, two years after 
composing Pyramus and ThisbCy he attempted a bolder 
flight in his little epic of Constantia and Philetus^ 
being then twelve years of age, and by the year 1633 
he had accumulated such a store of poems that his 
friends determined to hide the treasure no longer from 
the world. 

The first edition of the Poetical Blossoms^ by A, C, 
is a charming little quarto of thirty-two leaves. It is 
now one of the chief prizes of book-hunters, and a 
great bibliographical rarity. It ought to possess, what 
is often lost, a large portrait of the author at the 
age of thirteen, as the frontispiece. Referring to this 
volume in after-life, Cowley spoke of it as published 
at the age of thirteen, in all probability recollecting 
and being misled by this portrait ; and his error has 
been repeated ever since. As a matter of fact, how- 
ever, he was in his fifteenth year. It opens with a 
pompous httle invocation to the Muse Melpomene, and 
is then introduced to the public, after the fashion of 
the day, by commendatory verses signed by two 
schoolfellows. One of these, Robert Meade, became 
a man of some note, and, twenty years after this, a 
candidate himself for poetic honours in his comedy of 
Tke Combat between Friendship and Love, Cowley's 
contributions are five in number — *' Constantia and 
Philetus," '^ Pyramus and Thisbe,'' ^' Elegy on the 



Abraham Cowley 195 

Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton," '' Elegy on Mr. 
Richard Clark,'' and '^A Dream of Elysium." 

Let any reader of Pyramus and Thisbe consider how 
nai've, artless, and infantine are the writings of the 
very cleverest child of ten that he has ever known 
when compared with this first work of Cowley's. After 
more than two hundred years it remains still readable 
— much more readable, in fact, than many of its 
author's more elaborate poems of maturity. The 
story of that ^'palpable-gross play" that well beguiled 
Theseus and Hippolyta to laughter, is here told in 
all tragic seriousness, but not without several signs, 
such as " the sucking of odoriferous breath," that show 
Cowley to have been familiar with the drama so un- 
successfully produced at Athens with Bottom for the 
hero. The boy-poet has been ambitious enough to 
invent a new stanza, and a rather good one too, as 
will be acknowledged from this example. Thisbe finds 
Pyramus dead, and after tearing her golden hair — 

" She blames all-powerful Jove, and strives to take 
His bleeding body from the moistened ground ; 
She kisses his pale face till she doth make 
It red with kissing, and then seeks to wake 

His parting soul with mournful words, his wound 
Washes with tears that her sweet voice confound." 

Pyramus and Thisbe is a work which few of the 
adult poets of that day would have been ashamed of 
writing. It contains mistakes of rhyme and grammar 
that might be so easily corrected that they form an 
interesting proof that the poem was not touched up 
for the press by older hands ; but in other respects it 



I 



196 Seventeenth Century Studies 

is smooth and singularly mature^ The heroic verse 
in which it is written is nerveless, but correct, and 
the story is told in a straightforward way, and with a 
regular progress, that are extraordinary in so young 
a child. It was dedicated to the head-master of West- 
minster, Lambert Osbalston. 

The amazing promise of Pyrmnus and Thisbe is 
hardly justified by the cleverness of the poem written 
two years later, Constantia and Philetus, There is 
here hardly any sign at all of immaturity, but a far 
worse fault than childishness has stepped in. Instead 
of being like the puerile poem of a little boy, it is like 
the correct and tedious work of some man that never 
can be famous. In point of grammar and rhyme there 
is a great advance apparent, and we see the justice of 
the pretty phrase Cowley afterwards used in speaking 
of these juvenile pieces, ^'that even so far backward 
there remain yet some traces of me in the little foot- 
steps of a child ; '' for the language has already begun 
to take the same ingenious turns and involutions that 
characterise The Mistress and the Odes. It is, indeed, 
singular that, at the age of twelve, the child should be 
so much the father of the man as to produce this most 
Cowleyan stanza, illustrative of the author's high-flown 
rhetoric, as much as those I have just referred to are 
of his ingenuity : — 

*' Oh ! mighty Cupid 1 whose unbounded sway 
Hath often ruled the Olympian Thunderer, 
Whom all celestial deities obey, 

Whom men and gods both reverence and fear ! 
Oh, force Constantia's heart to yield to Love, 
Oj^ all thy wo7'ks the Masterpiece Hwill proved 



Abraham Cowley 197 

Constantia and Philetus is an extremely tragical tale, 
not so briefly or so simply told as Pyrmnus and 
Thisbe, and is padded out by *' songs" and 'Metters" 
to the extent of nearly seven hundred lines, an extra- 
ordinary feat, of course, for so young a child. Of the 
other pieces in the volume, the *' Elegy on Dudley, 
Lord Carlton," an imitation of Ben Jonson, must date 
from the year of that statesman's death, 163 1; **A 
Dream of Elysium " is almost a very charming reverie 
on the poets of old and the dreams of neo-pagan 
romance: we say *' almost," for something of the 
essence of poetry is wanting. 

While Cowley was posing as the child-genius at 
Westminster, a youth ten years his senior was about 
to retire to a solitude at Horton which was to enrich 
English poetry with some of its most exquisite and 
most perfect treasures. It is possible that the fame 
of Cowley's precocity had reached the ears of Milton 
when he lamented, in his earliest sonnet, now the 
seventh, that no bud or blossom adorned his late 
spring, such as endued "more timely-happy spirits." 
However this may be, we have no reason to prefer 
to the slow maturity of such a manhood as his the 
exhausting precocity of Cowley's marvellous boyhood. 
His contemporaries, however, thought otherwise, and 
when the Poetical Blossoms appeared in 1633 it en- 
joyed an immediate popularity. A few months earlier,] 
Milton's first printed English verses, the lines on 
Shakespeare, had appeared in front of the Second! 
Folio. Whether Ben Jonson, now bed-ridden and 
almost blind, but still eager in poetic matters, expressed 



198 Seventeenth Century Studies 

any favour for the verses of Cowley, is not known. 
But various signs in the writings of the latter tend to 
show that he was increasingly influenced by the style 
of Jonson, and anxious to write like one of his poetic 
''sons." The very year that the public career of 
Cowley commenced, that of Jonson virtually closed in 
the publication of The Tale of a Tub, But Randolph, 
that admirable writer and dramatic poet, whose early 
death cut short a career that promised great things in 
literature, was continuing the traditions of the school 
with the utmost brilliance. There can be no doubt 
that in longing to go to Cambridge, as we know that 
Cowley did, the desire of associating with Randolph was 
not the least inducement. His Lovers Riddle proves 
that he was familiar with The Jealous Lovers y printed 
in 1632. But we shall presently return to this. 

Just as Cowley was leaving Westminster to go to 
Cambridge, in 1636, a second edition of Poetical 
Blossoms was called for, and appeared in a smaller 
form, much augmented. Among the additions was 
an ode containing these fine and thoughtful verses 
written at the age of thirteen : — 

" This only grant me, that my means may lie 
Too low for envy, for contempt too high ; 
Some honour I would have, 
Not from great deeds, but good alone ; 
Th' unknown are better than ill-known. 
Rumour can ope the grave : 
Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends 
Not on the number, but the choice of friends. 

Books should, not business, entertain the light, 
And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night. 



Abraham Cowley 199 

My house a cottage, more 
Than palace, and should fitting be 
For all my use, no luxury. 
My garden painted o'er 
With nature's hand, not art's ; and pleasures yield 
Horace might envy in his Sabine field." 

It was for strains of this elevated morality that Cowley 
won the enthusiastic praise of such later didactic 
writers as Denham and Roscommon, and in a certain 
sense originated a school. As an example of another 
class of gifts, we may read with pleasure the amusing 
piece called The Poetical Revenge^ the story of which 
may be here told in prose. Cowley, having made an 
appointm.ent with a young companion to meet him in 
Westminster Hall at a certain hour, waited in vain, 
till he despaired of his friend, and out of curiosity 
went into one of the courts. Here he found a vacant 
seat, and made himself at home, when a fellow in a 
satin suit came and pushed him out. Whereupon 
Cowley expostulated so loudly that a barrister, '*a 
neat man in a ruff,'' rose and said, ''Boy, get you 
gone ; this is no school ! " To which Master Impu- 
dence replied, ''Oh no! for if it were, all you gowned 
men would go up for false Latin ! " At this 

" The young man 
Aforesaid, in the satin suit, began 
To strike me ; doubtless there had been a fray 
Had I not providently skipped away. 
Without replying," 

but not without inwardly murmuring this curse : 

" May he L 

Be by his father in his study took m 

At Shakespeare's Plays, instead of my Lord Coke." ' 



200 Seventeenth Century Studies 

The additional poems are all far better than the first 
infantine verses. There is more eloquence, more 
enthusiasm, more power, and some of the odes are 
fully worthy, at least in extract, of a place in all collec- 
tions of English poetry. They breathe a great pride 
in the art of poesy, great desire for and confidence of 
fame, and a scholastic turn of mind. 

" 'Tis not a pyramid of marble stone, 
Though high as our ambition ; 
'Tis not a tomb cut out in brass, which can 

Give life to the ashes of a man, 
But verses only." 

Throughout Cowley^s life, however occupied with 
courtly intrigue or with public duty, he never failed 
to be true to this boyish declaration of faith. 

He was entered a scholar of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, and proceeded thither with the manuscript of 
his pastoral drama of Love's Riddle^ written about the 
age of sixteen, in his pocket. Though Randolph was 
unhappily dead, there were others who would welcome 
the boy-genius to the banks of the Cam. Suckling, 
Cleveland, Fanshawe, Beaumont, and Crashaw were 
all at Cambridge; and with the last of these, at any 
rate, he struck up an immediate friendship. It is pro- 
bable also that the needy and forlorn Butler, in some 
obscure corner of a college, was picking up such odd 
scraps of learning as vary the pages of Hudibras. 
Cowley, with a different fate, came into port with 
flowing sails, and lost no time in winning a position. 
In 1637 a third edition of the Poetical Blossoms was 
published, and in 1638 his pastoral comedy of Lovers 



Abraham Cowley 20 f 

Riddle, This made what was then considered a very 
dainty little volume, adorned with a portrait of the 
young author, pretty but pertly smiling, while a florid 
angel descends from heaven with a great quill pen in 
one hand, and in the other a garland of laurel that he 
lays on the flowing silky locks. A prologue to Sir 
Kenelm Digby apologises that 

" The style is low, such as you'll easily take 
For what a swain might say or a boy make." 

This boyish drama is one of the most readable 
things that Cowley ever executed, and is in distinct 
following, without imitation, of Randolph's Jealous 
Lovers, It is written in good blank verse, with con- 
siderable sprightliness of dialogue, and with several 
threads of intrigues that are held well in hand, and 
drawn skilfully together at last. CalHdora, the heroine, 
flies from her father's court, and Act I. describes her 
arrival and welcome by some vulgar but amusing 
shepherds ; the next act shows how anguished at 
her loss every one at her father's court is, but espe- > 
cially her lover Philistes ; and the rest of the action, \ 
of course, records the vicissitudes that prevent their ! 
reunion until the fifth act. I have no space to quote, 
but may in passing be permitted to refer to the last 
scene of the second act, as containing a passage of 
genuine and delightful humour. In Lovers Riddle 1 
there is much, as I have said, to praise ; but there / 
is an absence of many qualities that Cowley never/ 
possessed, and which are essential to pastoral poetry. 
There is no genuine passion, no knowledge of the 



202 Seventeenth Century Studies 

phenomena of nature, no observant love of birds or 
flowers or the beauties of country life. All the exqui- 
site touches that illuminate The Faithful Shepherdess 
are eminently absent ; nor have we in the precocious 
humour of the world-wise boy any equivalent for the 
sweet garrulous music of Chalkhill or Browne. 

In February of the same year, 1638, was published, 
but not translated until by Charles Johnson in 1 705, 
a five-act Latin comedy, Naufragium J ocular e^ in prose 
and verse, the scene laid at Dunkirk, but the style and 
persons strictly imitative of Plautus. In emulation of 
the Miles GloriosuSy there is a loud boasting soldier 
named Bombardomachides ! Later on in 1638, Cowley 
completed his twentieth year. At the age when youths 
of talent are usually beginning to dream of future 
enterprise, he found himself an admired and popular 
poet, author of three successful works, and highly 
esteemed as a rising scholar. With long fair hair 
falling on his shoulders, and with a fresh, intelligent 
face, he must without doubt have been an elegant 
youth in the fashion of the day, even if with none of 
the superlative beauty of John Milton, '^ the Lady of 
Christ^s." With all the adulation which he received, 
his sensible young head does not seem to have been 
turned. Past all the praises of the present, he looked 
wistfully forward into the future ; and with some ink- 
ling, perhaps, that his fine talents could not promise the 
lasting crown he sought for, he set himself the memor- 
able enigma with which his Miscellanies open : — 

I " What shall I do to be for ever known 
I And make the age to come my own ? " 



Abraham Cowley 203 

With these same Miscellanies and with the preparation 
of the volume called The Mistress he seems to have 
been quietly and happily occupied until the breaking 
out of the Civil War. We can at all events affix dates 
to the elegies on Sir Henry Wootton (1639) and Sir / 
Anthony Vandyke (1641), each displaying increased,^ 
facility in skilful employment of the heroic couplet. { 
The visit of Prince Charles to Cambridge in 1641 
gave occasion to the production of a more bulky work. 
In a great hurry Cowley was called upon to write a \^ 
comedy, and The Guardian^ an ill-digested, unrevised I 
performance, was acted before His Royal Highness on | 
March 12. The prologue fiercely satirised the Round- I 
heads, and sneered at Prynne, who had just published 
his ridiculous Jersey poem of Mont-OrgueiL The 
farcical part of the piece is in prose, but the grand 
personages, Lucia and her lover Trueman Junior, talk 
in blank verse. The part of a poet, Doggrell, is 
amusing, but insisted on too much. One sentence put 
into the mouth of a girl, Aurelia, is worth recording : — 

" I shall never hear my virginals when I play upon 'em, for 
her daughter Tabitha's singing of psalms ; the first pious deed 
will be to banish Shakespeare and Ben Jonson out of the 
parlour, and to bring in their rooms Marprelate and Prynne's 
works." 

The Guardian was never included in the works of 
Cowley, and underwent some curious vicissitudes. It 
was not printed until 1650, when its author was in 
exile in Paris, and this, apparently, unauthorised 
edition is very rare. When Cowley returned to 
England he entirely rewrote the play in the year 1658, 



204 Seventeenth Century Studies 



an 
ICi 



,nd it was brought out on the stage as T/ie Cutter of 
^ole^nan Street^ but proved a complete failure. Cowley 
/finally tried the effect of his piece in print by publish- 
I ing it in 1663, but again to receive the disapproval of 
I the critics. 

Happy in his work at the University, and in his 
newly attained fellowship, the young poet was busy on 
many literary schemes, and mainly on an epic, the 
DavideiSj on the sorrows and victories of King David, 
when the great Civil War broke upon him like a wave. 
After the indecisive battle of Edgehill, Oxford became 
for a while the headquarters of the Royalists. Thither 
Crashaw had already gone, in 1641, and Cowley was 
now fain to follow. Cambridge was now no longer a 
bed of roses to a Royalist poet, and Cowley ''was 
soon torn thence by that public violent storm which 
would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted 
up every plant, even from the princely cedars to me, 
the hyssop. Yet I had as good fortune as could have 
befallen me in such a tempest, for I was cast by it into 
jthe favour of one of the best persons, and into the 
icourt of one of the best princesses of the world." 
These were Lord Falkland and Queen Henrietta Maria, 
to whom the sobriety and excellent fidelity of Cowley 
pointed him out as a fit staff to lean upon in such 
perilous times. 

Yet it was not in him not to cling to scholarship, 
and for two years more, or somewhat less, he pursued 
his studies at Oxford with no less ardour than before 
at Cambridge. But Newbury shook and Naseby broke 
the hopes of the Cavaliers. The Queen fled to Paris, 



Abraham Cowley 205 

and Cowley followed her, leaving the Earl of Manchester 
and his Puritan divines to purge the University and 
eject the sixty-five fellows, of whom Crashaw was one. , 
The melancholy mystic repaired, as we have seen in ] 
the last chapter, to Paris, where in 1646 Cowley i 
found him in utter destitution, and, with character-! 
istic warmth of heart, insisted on labouring for his' 
relief. 

In the meantime Cowley himself was on terms of 
confidential intimacy with the Queen and the heads 
of her party. All his time and thought were dedicated 
to delicate diplomacy, and he was despatched to various 
parts of Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, and Holland on 
private state business. But when the King was given 
up by the Scots into the custody of the Parliamentary 
Commissioners, in January 1647, Cowley was recalled 
to Paris to undertake a yet more onerous duty. To 
no one less trustworthy than himself would Henrietta I 
Maria delegate the preparation of those letters in cipher | 
by means of which she communicated with her husband 
till his execution in 1649. Cowley was next occupied j 
in corresponding with the leaders of Royalist reaction 
in Scotland and Ireland. But when the young King 
Charles took refuge in Holland, and the Anglo-Parisian 
Court was in some measure broken up, it was sug- 
gested that Cowley should return to England, "and, 
under pretence of privacy and retirement, should take 
occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in 
this country." He was immediately caught, however, 
and imprisoned, apparently in the year 1655 ; nor did 
he regain his Hberty on a less bail than of £1000, 



2o6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

At CromwelFs death in 1658 he ventured back into 
France, and remained there until the Restoration. 

In the course of eighteen years of enforced inaction, 
much had occurred to literary men, though little to 
literature itself Just before the Civil War broke out, 
a whole group of eminent dramatists, among whom 
may be named Jonson, Ford, Massinger, and Field, 
had passed away. The years of contention saw the 
deaths of Carew, Suckling, Cartwright, Quarles, and 
Drummond. In 1649 Cowley's dear friend and brother, 
Richard Crashaw, had breathed his last at the shrine 
of Loreto. A new generation had meanwhile been 
born — Shadwell, Wycherley, Southerne, and Otway. 
Even in the Civil War, moreover, poetry was read 
and published. In 1647, the year before the Hesperi- 
des was brought out, an edition, probably pirated, of 
Cowley's love-cycle, called The Mistress^ was issued 
\ in England. From the last piece in this collection we 
/ learn, or are intended to believe, that Cowley wrote 
\ them in three years, during which time he was tor- 
mented with a love-passion that he saw at last to be 
^ hopeless. It is just possible that, like Waller, he was 
i really devoted to some lady of rank beyond his reach, 
\ but the poems themselves breathe no ardour of tender- 
j ness, and such a supposition is directly at variance 
\ with his own singularly frank exposition of the genesis 
of the book. ^' Poets," he says, ^^ are scarce thought 
freemen of their company, without paying some duties, 
and obliging themselves to be true to love. Sooner 
or later they must all pass through their trial, like 
some Mahometan monks that are bound by their order, 



Abraham Cowley 207 

once at least in their life, to make a pilgrimage to 
Mecca/' 

The Mistress was fated to become one of the most 
admired books of the age. It was a pocket compendium 
of the science of being ingenious in affairs of the heart; 
and its purity and scholastic phrase recommended it 
to many who were no judges of poetry, but very keen 
censors of morality. To us it is the most unreadable 
production of its author, dry and tedious, without 
tenderness, without melancholy, without music. Here 
and there we find a good rhetorical line, such as — 

" Love which is soul to body and soul of me ; " \ 

and, what is very curious, almost all the pieces lead 
off with a sonorous and well-turned phrase. But 
scarcely one is readable throughout; scarcely one is 
even ridiculous enough for quotation. All are simply 
dull, overloaded with ingenious, prosaic fancy, and set 
to eccentric measures of the author's invention, that 
but serve to prove his metrical ineptitude. 

It is not correct to say that these poems continue 
and cultivate to excess the over-ornate style of the 
philosophical poets of the generation before. When 
Habington loads his pages with tasteless conceits, he 
over-colours his style in the manner learned from 
Lyly, Marini, and Gongora. So Donne, in a more 
brilliant and masculine way, errs in the introduction of 
unsuitable and monstrous ornament. But Cowley is 
hardly ornamented at all, and his heresy is not so 
much that of Marini as that of the inflated, prosaic 
French poets of the class of Saint Amant. He seizes 



\ 

I 



2o8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

an idea, perhaps sensible, perhaps preposterous, but 
in no case beautiful ; he clothes this idea with illustra- 
yrtion drawn, not from external nature or objects of any 
Ikind, but from the supposed phenomena of the human 
f Wnd. I think we can trace all this pedantic ingenuity 
to the personal training and example of Dr. Henry 
More, who was the great oracle of English Platonism 
at Cambridge during Cowley^s residence there, and 
whose extraordinary volume of Philosophical PoemSj 
published in 1640, may, I think, be constantly found 
reflected in the lyrics of the younger poet. And in 
considering why these poems of Cowley's were popular, 
we must not forget to note that the prose writings of 
More and others of his stamp were greatly delighted 
in by the seventeenth century, although now entirely 
unread. The taste for these ingenuities and para- 
doxical turns of thought came like a disease, and 
passed away. So Cowley, who confidently believed 
that time to come would admit him to have been 
''Love's last and greatest prophet," and who was 
quoted as having written what ensphered the whole 
world of love, is now justly denied the humblest place 
among the erotic poets. One piece alone must be 
excepted in this sweeping condemnation. The poem 
called " The Wish " is so simple, sincere, and fresh, 
that we are disposed to wonder at finding so delicious 
a well in such an arid desert. Thus it begins : — 

" Well then, I now do plainly see 
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree ; 
The very honey of all earthly joy 

Does of all meats the soonest cloy. 



Abraham Cowley 209 

And they, methinks, deserve my pity, 
Who for it can endure the stings, 
The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings, 
Of this great hive, the City. 

" Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave. 
May I a small house and large garden have ! 
And a few friends and many books, both true, 
Both wise, and both delightful too ! 
And since Love ne'er will from me flee, 
A mistress moderately fair. 
And good as guardian- angels are. 
Only beloved, and loving me." 

The moral purity of Cowley^s muse in so licentious 
a time must not pass without praise, if only to rebut 
the foolish and fanatic rage of such critics as the 
Rev. Edmund Elys, who sought, after his death, to 
persuade the public to the contrary. As a matter of 
fact, Cowley seldom forgot to write as became a / I 
gentleman. 

In 1648 a very inferior satire, The Four Ages of 
England^ and again a piece of doggerel called A Satire 
against Separatists^ were printed, with the name of 
Abraham Cowley on the title-pages. With these pro- 
ductions he had nothing to do, nor with the printing 
of The Guardian in 1650. The increased demand for 
his unpublished writings and the fear of piracy deter- 
mined him, so soon as he was released on bail, to 
set about revising his ^genuine^'writings for the press. | 
The result was the appearance, in 1656, of a very | 
important volume, the Works of A, Cowley^ in small I 
folio. This contained many things long ago written 
or imagined, and never before presented to the public. 

o 



1 



2IO Seventeenth Century Studies 

The opening section of the book consisted of the 
Miscellanies^ poems the composition of which had ex- 
tended over many years. Among the most notable 
pieces are ''The Motto," an admirable poem on his 
artistic aspirations and ambitions; ''The Ode of Wit," 
which contains an odd reference to a Bajazet on the 
stage, which seems just too early to be Racine's, and 
may probably be Magnon's, which was brought out at 
Paris in 1648; a horrid "Ode to Dick, my Friend," 
which is worthy of study as a perfect summary of 
Cowley's sins of style ; a prettily conceived poem called 
" Friendship in Absence," which is unhappily spoiled 
by an inherent wooden ingenuity that never ceases to 
obtrude itself; "The Chronicle," an amusing jeu 
d^esprit, in which he feigns to make for himself such 
a list of conquered hearts as Leporello quotes on 
his master's account in Don Giovanni ; an epistle to 
Davenant from Jersey, compHmenting him on the 
publication of Gondibertj and making fun of Prynne's 
absurd verses ; and finally two really splendid elegies 
on William Harvey and on Richard Crashaw. 

These two latter poems, as perhaps the finest wheat 

that the winnowing of criticism will finally leave on this 

wide granary-floor, we must examine more at leisure. 

William Harvey, who is not by any means to be 

i^ confounded with the great physiologist, was a young 

I friend and fellow-student of Cowley's, with whom he 

I was on terms of sympathetic and affectionate intimacy. 

^This excellent and gifted lad, like another Arthur 

Hallam, was taken away suddenly by fever in the 

midst of his hopes and labours. Cowley celebrated 



Abraham Cowley 211 

his memory in an elegy of unusual directness and 
tenderness : — 

" Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say 

Have ye not seen us walking every day ? 

Was there a tree about, which did not know 
The love betwixt us two ? 

Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade, 
Or your sad branches thicker join 
And into darksome shades combine. 

Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid. 

/jThis seems to prophesy of that later lovely dirge of 

j Thyrsis and the tree that knew the soul of the Scholar- 

\ Gipsy. Cowley was incapable of long sustaining these 

level flights, and the poem grows didactic and flat as 

it proceeds, but gathers fire and force in the last 

stanza : — 

" And if the glorious saints cease not to know 
Their wretched friends who fight with life below, 
Thy flame to me doth still the same abide. 

Only more pure and rarified. 
There whilst immortal hymns thou dost rehearse, 

Thou dost with holy pity see 

Our dull and earthly poesy 
Where grief and misery can be joined with verse." 

But the fine elegiac qualities of these memorial verses 

on Harvey are quickened into ardour, nay, we may 

almost say fired into rapture, in the lines on the death 

of Crashaw. In the first case, the poignant regret of an 

/intimate and private sorrow inspired the poem ; in the 

I second, the public loss of a poet whom Cowley might 

|J be well forgiven for fancying absolutely supreme, were 

f^ combined with personal grief at the loss of a friend. 



/ 



212 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Friendship and poetry were the two subjects that 
alone set Cowley^s peculiar gifts on flame. Languid 
or insincere on other subjects, on these two he never 
failed to be eloquent. In the elegy on Crashaw these 
combined to stimulate his lyric powers to their utmost, 
and the result was most brilliant. Crashaw, after 
suffering so much after his ejection from Cambridge, 
had been helped, as we have seen, by the noble exer- 
tions of Cowley. When the news of his death at 
Loreto was circulated, hardly a voice in England was 
raised to his honour save that of Cowley, who never 
failed in manly and courageous acts of fidelity. '* Poet 
and saint," he begins, braving all criticism in the outset, 
thou art now in heaven, companion of the angels, who, 
when they call on thee for songs, can have no greater 
pleasure than to hear thine old earthly hymns. '^Thy 
spotless muse," says Cowley, '*like Mary, did contain 
the Godhead ; " and did disdain to sing of any lower 
matter than eternity. In this strain he proceeds half 
through the elegy, and then in a sudden ecstasy of 
contemplation he cries : — 

" How well, blest Swan, did Fate contrive thy death, 
And made thee render up thy tuneful breath 
In thy great mistress' arms ! thou most divine 
And richest offering of Loreto's shrine ! 
Where like some holy sacrifice to expire, 
A fever burns thee, and Love lights the fire. 
Angels, they say, brought the famed chapel there, 
And bore the sacred load in triumph through the air, — 
'Tis surer much they brought thee there, and they 
And thou, their charge, went singing all the way." 

But he feels it needful to apologise to the AngHcan 



Abraham Cowley 213 

Church for saying that angels led Crashaw when from 
her he went, and thus the elegy finally winds up: — 

" His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might 
Be wrong ; his life, I'm sure, was in the right, 
And I myself a Catholic will be, 
So far, at least, great Saint, to pray to thee. 
Hail, Bard triumphant ! and some care bestow 
On us, the poets militant below. 
Opposed by our old enemy, adverse Chance, 
Attacked by Envy and by Ignorance, 
Enchained by Beauty, tortured by Desires, 
Exposed by tyrant Love to savage beasts and fires. 
Thou from low earth in nobler flames didst rise, 
And, like Elijah, mount alive the skies, 
Elisha-like (but with a wish much less 
More fit thy greatness and my littleness) 
Lo, here I beg, — I whom thou once didst prove 
So humble to esteem, so good to love, — 
Not that thy spirit might on me doubled be, 
I ask but half thy mighty spirit for me, 
And when my Muse soars with so strong a wing 
'Twill learn of things divine, and first of thee to sing." 

The reader will not need to be persuaded that these 
are very exquisite and very brilHant lines. Had Cowley 
written often in such a nervous strain as this, he had 
needed no interpreter or apologist to-day ; nay, more — 
Dryden, his occupation gone, would have had to pour 
the vigour of his genius into some other channel. The | 
tenderness of the allusion to Crashaw^s sufferings and I 
persecution, the tact and sweetness of the plea for his I 
saintship, the sudden passion of invocation, the modest I 
yet fervent prayer at the close, — all these are felicities i 
of the first order of rhetorical poetry. I 



214 Seventeenth Century Studies 

At the close of the Miscellanies were printed, in the 

volume of 1656, twelve translations or imitations of 

the Odes of Anacreon done into octosyllabic verse, or 

rather, into that iambic measure of either seven or eight 

syllables, but always of four cadences, which Milton 

used with such admirable effect in his minor poems 

I and Comus, Cowley, whose ear was certainly not 

V sensitive, could ill afford to compete with Milton in 

\ melody, and made some sad discords with this delicate 

\ instrument. Stanley, again, in 165 1, had introduced 

\ this kind of writing to the public with a great deal 

Vore spirit. Still, Cowley ^s Anacreontics are frequently 

pretty and sparkling, and they have been praised, 

even in our own time, at the expense of all his other 

writings. In this judgment, however, I can by no 

means coincide. 

The second division of the folio is occupied with the 
Mistress J reprinted from the edition of 1647. This, 
again, is followed by the Pindarique Odes. In pub- 
lishing these odes Cowley performed a dangerous in- 
* novation ; nothing at all like these pompous lyrics in 
\a)ers libres had hitherto been attempted or suggested in 
fenglish. In his preface he acknowledged this with a 
proud humility characteristic of the man. '' I am in 
great doubt whether they will be understood by most 
readers, nay, even by very many who are well enough 
acquainted with the common roads and ordinary tracks 
of poesy. The figures are unusual and bold even to 
temerity, and such as I durst not have to do withal in 
any other kind of poetry : the numbers are various 
and irregular, and sometimes, especially some of the 



Abraham Cowley 215 

long ones, seem harsh and uncouth, if the just measures 
and cadences be not observed in the pronunciation. 
So that almost all their sweetness and numerosity, 
which is to be found, if I mistake not, in the roughest, 
if rightly repeated, lies in a manner wholly at the 
mercy of the reader." The readers of the day were 
very merciful or very uncritical, for it was chiefly on 
the score of those raucous odes that so many sweet 
words were said about **the majestick numbers of Mr. 
Cowley.*' They became the rage, and founded a whole 
school of imitators. Bishop Sprat states in his Life of 
Cowley that the poet was set thinking on this style of 
poetry by finding himself with the works of Pindar in 
a place where there were no other books. It seems 
likely that this place was Jersey or some other 
temporary station of exile, while his headquarters 
were at Paris. 

The writing of irregular inflated verse of a rhetorical 

character was just coming into fashion in France. 

Although condemned by Boileau, it was frequently 

practised by Corneille, and still more characteristically, 

long after Cowley's death, by Racine in Esther and ; 

Athalie. But to Cowley is due the praise of inventing 

.or introducing a style of ode which was a new thing 

■\ pn modern literature, and which took firm hold of our 

Mboetry until, in Collins, it received its apotheosis and 

i its death-blow. But though the chaster form of ode 

designed by Collins from a Greek model has ever since 

his day ruled in our poetic art, there has always been 

a tendency to return to the old standard of Cowley. 

So lately as our own day, Mr. Lowell's Commemoration 



2i6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Ode is a specimen of the informal poem of unequal 
lines and broken stanzas supposed to be in the manner 
of Pindar, but truly the descendant of our Royalist 
poet^s '* majestick numbers/^ * Keats, Shelley, and 
Swinburne, on the other hand, have restored to the 
ode its harmony and shapeliness. Congreve attempted 
a diversion in favour of regularity, but in vain, and 
until the days of Collins and Gray, the ode modelled 
upon Cowley was not only the universal medium for 
congratulatory lyrics and pompous occasional pieces, 
but it was almost the only variety permitted to the 
melancholy j;:gj]Leratijpns over whom the hjeroic couplet 
reigned supreme. Dryden, whose Song on St Cecilia! s 
f Day directly imitates Cowley^s Ode on the Resun^ec- 
tion^ used it with grand effect for his rolling organ- 
music. The forgotten lyrists of the Restoration found 
it a pecuHarly convenient instrument in their bound 
and inflexible fingers. Pope only once seriously 
diverged from the inevitable couplet, and then to 
adopt the ode-form of Cowley. Yet so rapidly had 
the fame of the latter declined that Pope could ask, 
in 1737— 

" Who now reads Cowley ? if he pleases yet, 
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit ; 
Forgot his Epic, nay, Pindaric art. 
But still I love the language of his heart." 

^ The language of the heart has not much to do with 

^the Odes of 1656. They are fifteen in number, and 

open with two paraphrases of Pindar himself, the second 

* See Appendix, 



Abraham Cowley 217 

Olympic and the first Nemean. Following these is a 
praise of ^* Pindar's unnavigable Song/' in imitation of 
Horace. The remaining twelve are supposed to be 
original, but two are taken from the prophetic Scrip- 
tures. One on '* Destiny " contains the following lines, 
which form a favourable example of Cowley's style of 
Pindarising and of the construction of his odes. In 
a series of grotesque and rather unseemly images, he 
declares that he was taken from his mother's childbed 
by the lyric Muse, and that she addressed him thus, as 
he lay naked in her hands : — 

" * Thou of my church shalt be ; 
Hate and renounce,' said she, 
* Wealth, honour, pleasures, all the world for me. 
Thou neither great at court, nor in the war. 
Nor at the Exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar. 
Content thyself with the small barren praise 
That neglected verse doth raise.' 
She spake, and all my years to come 
Took their unlucky doom. 
Their several ways of life let others choose. 
Their several pleasures let them use. 
But I was born for love, and for a Muse. 

" With fate what boots it to contend ? 
Such I began, such am, and so must end. 
The star that did my being frame 

Was but a lambent flame. 
And some small light it did dispense, 
But neither heat nor influence. 
No matter, Cowley, let proud Fortune see 
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee. 
Let all her gifts the portion be 
Of folly, lust, and flattery. 
Fraud, extortion, calumny, 



21 8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Murder, infidelity, 
Rebellion, and hypocrisy. 
Do not thou grieve or blush to be 
As all the inspired tuneful men, 
And all thy great forefathers were from Homer down to Ben." 

With such a sonorous hyber-alexandrine he loves 
to wind his odes up in a stormy close. Else, in spite 
of much well and even nobly said, and in spite of 
occasional lines and couplets such as — 

" Whether some brave young man's untimely fate 
In words worth dying for he celebrate," 

or, 

" Where never fish did fly 
And with short silver wings cut the low liquid sky," 

which linger in the memory, the grandiose language 
and the broken versification unite to weary the ear 
and defy the memory. Nor can the Odes ever again 
take a living place in literature. But to the student 
they are very interesting as the forerunners of a whole 
current of loud-mouthed lyric invocation not yet silent 
after more than two centuries. 

The folio of 1656 closed with the sacred epic of the 
DavideiSy on the sorrows and achievements of David. 
We have already seen that this poem was conceived, 
and in great part written, while Cowley was at 
Cambridge. It is in four books, and composed in the 
heroic couplet, varied with occasional alexandrines, 
another innovation introduced by Cowley and accepted 
by Dryden, but excluded from the rules of verse by 
Pope. The first book of the Davideis opens with an 
invocation, couched in language very similar to that 



Abraham Cowley 219 

employed in the Elegy on Crashaw, and bearing 
internal evidence of being of a later date than the rest 
of the piece. These lines may be quoted as excep- 
tionally tuneful and earnest : — 

" Lo, with pure hands thy heavenly fires to take, 
My well-changed Muse I a chaste vestal make ! 
From earth^s vain joys, and love's soft witchcraft free, 
I consecrate my Magdalene to thee ! 
Lo, this great work, a temple to thy praise, 
On polished pillars of strong verse I raise I " 

The action commences in hell, where the devil calls 
for a spirit who will tempt Saul. Envy replies, and 
her figure is described in lines of great power and 
realistic horror, which were evidently studied by 
Milton before he wrote his far finer description of Sin 
and Death. Envy flies up to SauFs palace, and 
whispers jealousy of David in his ear. 

" With that she takes 
One of her worst, her best-beloved snakes : 
' Softly, dear worm, soft and unseen,' said she, 
* Into his bosom steal, and in it be 
My viceroy.' At that word she took her flight. 
And her loose shape dissolved into the night." 

We are then transported to heaven, and into the 
presence of God Himself, who sends an angel to David. 
In consequence, David goes to play before Saul, and 
Saul in vain tries to kill him. The book closes with 
a lengthy description of the Prophets' College, which/ 
appears to have been closely modelled on the Univer- 
sity of Cambridge. In certain passages, such as the 
pretty description of David and his wife walking 



220 Seventeenth Century Studies 

lamong the lemon-trees, Cowley approaches nearer 
ithan usual to a naturalistic style in poetry. The other 
Ithree books of this epic are tedious and redundant 
Jbeyond all endurance. , It is, in fact^J^^^^^^ ppem 

Jwith which, if you sit on the grass in a quiet place 
Bsome summer afternoon, you cannot by any means fail 
4to slumber soundly. This is indeed its only merit, 
y save that of marking a distinct step in thepfocess of 
f the ossification of the EngHsh heroic couplet. I must 
not omit, however, to acknowledge that in the third 
book there is a serenade, ''Awake, awake, my lyre,'* 
which ought to rank among Cowley^s most accom- 
plished lyrics. At the end was printed a translation, 
by the author, of the first book only, into Latin 
hexameters. 

While the volume we have been examining in detail 
was being prepared for the press, Cowley^s position 
was considered so equivocal, that he was urged, by 
way of diverting political suspicion, to study for some 
profession. He chose that of medicine, and although 
he was now forty years of age, worked like a young 
student at anatomy and materia inedica. In December 
1657, he passed a final examination at Oxford, but it 
does not appear to be recorded whether he ever prac- 
tised as a physician. The principal consequence of 
this line of labour was to interest Cowley in botany, 
which henceforward became increasingly his favourite 
study. 

At the death of Cromwell, as we have seen, he took 
occasion to slip back to his friends in France, and 
returned in 1660, only just in time to see through the 



Abraham Cowley 221 

press an Ode on his Majesty's Resto7^ation and Return^ f 
a Pindaric poem of immense length, very bombastic | 
and rhetorical, but no doubt earnest enough, and, for / 
those fulsome times, not extremely grovelling in its / 
attitude to Royalty. It was to be supposed that if 
any man deserved reward, it was he who with so much 
purity of purpose and devoted service had given the 
best years of a flourishing youth to the despairing 
cause of the King, and who, in spite of temptations, 
had never wavered in his active fidelity. But Cowley 
was not the man to win honours in such a court as 
that of Charles II. Of austere life, a sincere and even 
rigid religionist, an earnest lover of scholarship and 
holy living, he was looked upon with suspicion by 
the gay butterflies that flocked to Whitehall. Charles 
himself, who admired his genius and respected his 
character, was prejudiced against him by spiteful 
tongues, who pointed to certain pacific passages in 
his writings, as if they proved his lukewarmness in 
the Royalist cause. Nothing could be more wantonly 
unjust. In point of fact, Charles was too ready to 
embrace his enemies and let his friends shift for 
themselves. 

The poets, however, managed to provide for their 
own maintenance. The easy turncoat. Waller, came /[ 
skipping back to court ; Herrick regained his vicarage, f 
and Roscommon his wealth and influence. ^' In that 
year when manna rained on all, why should the Muse's 
fleece only be dry?'' lamented Cowley, who found 
himself alone unwatered by the golden shower of 
preferments. In his despair, he had resolved to go to 



222 Seventeenth Century Studies 

America, and seems to have made arrangements for so 
doing, when he discovered that his fortunes were at so 
low an ebb that he had not money enough for the 
outward voyage. He possessed two faithful friends, 
however — Lord St. Albans and the young Duke of 
Buckingham, afterwards author of the Rehearsal, By 
the united efforts of these noblemen a generous pro- 
vision was made for the poet, who was by these means 
relieved from anxiety, the world being all before him 
where to choose. 

In the language of Bishop Sprat, '' He was now 
weary of the vexations and formalities of an active 
condition. He had been perplexed with a long com- 
pliance to foreign manners. He was satiated with the 
arts of court, which sort of life, though his virtue had 
made innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. 
Immediately he gave over all pursuit of honour and 
riches in a time when, if any ambitious or covetous 
thoughts had remained in his mind, he might justly 
have expected to have them readily satisfied. In his 
last seven or eight years he was concealed in his 
beloved obscurity, and possessed that solitude which 
from his very childhood he had always most passion- 
ately desired. Though he had frequent invitations to 
return into business, yet he never gave ear to any 
persuasions of profit or preferment. His visits to the 
city and court were very few ; his stays in town were 
only as a passenger, not as an inhabitant. The places 
that he chose for the seats of his declining life were 
two or three villages on the banks of the Thames." 

In 1661 he published A Discourse by Way of Vision 



Abraham Cowley 223 

concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell^ one of 
his finest prose works, containing several pieces of 
verses, of no very striking merit; and in 1662 two 
books of plants in Latin verse, the result of his j 
enthusiastic but somewhat pedantic studies in botany. I 
These '' books " were printed after Cowley's death by 
Nahum Tate, in an English translation by the latter, 
by Mrs. Aphra Behn, a great imitator of the style, 
though not the ethics, of Cowley, and by certain other 
persons whose names are now forgotten. It must have 
-been about this time that he made the acquaintance of 
'* the matchless Orinda,'' Mrs. Katherine Philips, with 
whom he corresponded at great length, and for whom 
he seems to have shared the popular admiration. 
Orinda was a poetess of the new school, who preferred 
force of thinking in poetry before harmony or tender- 
ness of style, and her verses were expressly modelled 
upon those of Cowley. This remarkable young woman, 
who was but twenty-nine years of age at the time of 
the Restoration, had already a great reputation, and 
Elys declares that Cowley was no less enamoured of 
her poetry than impressed to a still more serious pietism 
by her devotional austerity. When she died, still 
young, in 1664, Cowley mourned her in an ode that 
passes all bounds of discretion and moderation, in # 
which he sets her above Sappho, and, what is stilly' 
more funny, above Pope Joan ! 

In 1663 he reprinted some poems that had appeared 
in his Essays on Verse and Prose, with other miscel- 
laneous pieces. The publication of this volume, which 
he entitled Verses on Several Occasions, was forced 



224 Seventeenth Century Studies 

upon him by the piratical printing of a volume of his 
inedited poems at Dublin. This small quarto contains 
fourteen copies of verses of an occasional kind. We 
find an ode on the death of Dr. William Harvey, the 
great anatomist; and an ^*Ode Sitting and Drinking 
^ in the Chair made out of the Rehcs of Sir Francis 
I Drake's Ship/' which is a capital instance of the 
I author's fantastic wit. He further included a number 
f of gracefully turned paraphrases from the Latin poets, 
particularly Horace, Martial, and Claudian. The soli- 
tude he had so long desired suited his body less than 
his mind, and about the time that this volume was 
published, when he was living at Barnes, he fell into a 
low fever, from which with great difficulty he recovered. 
He therefore removed, in 1666, to Chertsey, where he 
took the Porch House, towards the west end of that 
town, and bought some fields in the vicinity. He 
seems to have suffered again much during the one 
winter he spent there, but to have recovered in the 
spring ; but through staying over long in the meadows 
, one summer afternoon, superintending his labourers, 
|!he caught a cold, which he neglected. Within a 
I fortnight he died, on July 28, 1667, not having quite 
1 completed his fo rty-e ighth year. 

With his death his glory flourished. King Charles 
declared that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man 
behind him. On August 3 he was laid in Westminster 
Abbey, beside the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser. The 
Earl of Orrery composed a funeral poem, and Sir John 
Js-Denham, himself in a few months to die, wrote an 
M elegy, beginning ^' Old Chaucer, like the morning star," 



Abraham Cowley 225 

which is quoted in every work on English Hterature. 
All the poets of the day wrote '* Pindarique Odes/' in 
imitation of the transcendent poet of that form of 
verse, and his heroic couplet became the despair of all 
gentlemen who wrote with ease. 

"He who would worthily adorn his hearse, 
Should write in his own way, in his immortal verse," 

said Thomas Higgins, who indited a very good Pindaric 
ode to his memory. His fame was more materially 
served by Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, who 
published in Latin in 1668, and then in English in 
1669, ^ ^-if^ of Cowley y which is one of the very best 
examples of memorial prose or elegiac monograph in 
the language, being pure, elegant, and forcible in style, 
and full of fine thought. George, Duke of Buckingham, 
raised a monument to his memory in Westminster 
Abbey, and so, crowned with unusual honour, and 
lighted by the funeral flambeaux of temporal and spiri- 
tual peers, this poet also, like his obscurer brethren, 
went down into the place where all the incidental 
advantages of life are as if they had not been. 

If it be held that the two questions with which I 
started have not been wholly answered, and that I 
have still to show why Cowley once was the most 
popular poet of his age, and why he is now forgotten, 
a few words may, at all events, suffice to complete the 
reply. Every student of English poetry will admit 
that two great opposite influences have alternately 
ruled the writers of our verse. Before the age of 

Elizabeth, it is not quite so easy to mark the differ- 

p 



I 



226 Seventeenth Century Studies 

ence between the fresh and natural spirit of Chaucer 

and some of his Scottish followers, and the wholly 

didactic and scholastic spirit of Lydgate, Barclay, and 

Skelton ; but at least from the Mirror for Magistrates^ 

when poetry once more burst into sudden blossom, 

land every branch upon every tree rang with melodious 

I voices, it is easy enough to trace down to Herrick the 

i unbroken chain of objective and naturalistic poets, born 

to teach through singing, and not through rhetoric. 

With Cowley a wholly new influence came in. From 

I Cowley to Darwin all the poets made oratorical effect 

I take the place of the observation and inspired inter- 

'^pretation of nature. With Collins, through Cowper, 

and first fully in Wordsworth, there came that return 

to primal forms and primal feeling which still breathes 

in our latest poetry. 

Cowley gave the reading public a new experience. 
Tired of the exotic and over-jewelled style of the re- 
ligious and philosophical lyrists, tired of the romantic 
epic which had slipped from Shakespeare and Marlowe 
down into such hands as Chamberlayne's, tired of the 
Cavalier song-writers, who harped for ever on the 
same strained string, and with no ears or hearts for 
Milton's glorious revival, the public of the day rejoiced 
in Cowley as Parisian society of a generation before 
had welcomed Malherbe. Versification had lost all 
nerve and shape in the lax lips of the last slovenly 
dramatists. In France the great Corneille was making 
the stage resound with the harmonious cadences of his 
heroical couplets ; why should not England also aspire 
to such sublime eloquence, to such chaste numbers ? 



Abraham Cowley 227 

Feeling, passion, romance, colour, all these had been 
poured out so lavishly that the public palate was cloyed 
with sweetness. The severity of Cowley's writings, m 
their intellectual quality, their cold elevation and dryj| 
intelligence, were as charming as they were novel. But i 
the charm was not to last. A far greater man, Dryden, 
with assimilative genius of the most marvellous kind, 
was to tarnish the glory of Cowley by sheer superiority 
of imitation. No form of verse that the elder poet 
cultivated, with the single exception of the Elegy, but 
was to be carried to far greater perfection in the same 
line by the younger. Even to the technicality of the 
occasional use of an alexandrine in heroic verse, 
Dryden was to illuminate the discoveries of Cowley, 
not to strike out new paths for himself. 

Three writers of less influence than Cowley sup- "^^ 
ported the new school, and strengthened the determina- 
tion of Dryden. These were Davenant in his stilted, 
Gallicised dramas, Denham in his correct, but cold and 
measured descriptive poem of Cooper's Hill^ and Waller 
in his smooth, emasculated lyrics. Neither of these 
had Cowley's genius or power, but they all had the 
tact to seize the turn of the tide to put out into new 
seas. Waller had been the first to employ the new 
versification, but Cowley earliest perceived its propriety 
for didactic uses. To him, and to him alone, belongs 
the doubtful honour of inaugurating the reign of didactic 
and rhetorical poetry in England. 

It may be asked, why restore a memory so justly 
dishonoured, why recall to our attention a writer whose 
verses were but galvanised at the outset, and now are 



1 



22 8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

long past all hope of revival ? In the first place, if 
the judgment of a whole generation has unanimously 
set an unambitious man on a pedestal of supreme 
reputation, I am more ready to doubt my own percep- 
tion than to stigmatise so many cultivated persons with 
folly. No poet universally admired in his own age can 
be wholly without lasting merit. In the second place, 
Cowley in particular, whether judged as a man or as 
a litterateur y or even as a poet more or less malformed, 
has qualities of positive and intrinsic merit. I trust 
that my citations have at least proved so much. For 
the rest, I confess that I find a particular fascination 
in the study of these maimed and broken poets, these 
well-strung instruments upon whose throbbing strings 
Destiny has laid the pressure of her silencing fingers. 
The masters of song instil me with a sort of awe. I 
feel embarrassed when I write of Milton. But Cowley 
has surely grown humble in the long years of his exile, 
and he will not exact too much homage from the last 
of his admirers. 



1876. 



THE MATCHLESS ORINDA 

IT was not until the second half of the seventeenth 
century that women began to be considered com- 
petent to undertake literature as a profession. In 
the crowded galaxy of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets 
there is no female star even of the seventh magnitude. 
But with the Restoration, the wives and daughters, 
who had learned during the years of exile to act in 
political and diplomatic intrigue with independence 
and skill, took upon themselves to write independently 
too, and the last forty years of the century are crowded 
with the names of "celebrated scribbling women." 
Among all these the Matchless Orinda takes the fore- 
most place — not exactly by merit, for Aphra Behn sur- 
passed her in genius, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 
in versatility, and Catherine Trotter in professional 
zeal; but by the moral eminence which she attained 
through her elevated public career, and which she 
sealed by her tragical death. When the seventeenth 
century thought of a poetess, it naturally thought of 
Orinda; her figure overtopped those of her literary 
sisters; she was more dignified, more regal in her 
attitude to the public, than they were; and, in fine, 
she presents us with the best type we possess of the 

woman of letters in the seventeenth century. 

229 



230 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Yet modern criticism has entirely neglected her. I 
cannot find that any writer of authority has mentioned 
her name with interest since Keats, in 18 17, when 
he was writing Endymion^ came across her poems at 
Oxford, and in writing to Reynolds remarked that he 
found " a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher kind ^' in 
her poems, and quoted one piece of ten stanzas to 
prove it. In Mr. Ward's English Poets^ where so 
many names owe their introduction to one or two 
happy compositions which have survived the body of 
their works, I find no page dedicated to Orinda ; and 
I suppose she may fairly be considered as dead to the 
British public. If I venture to revive her here, it is 
not that I greatly admire her verses, or consider her 
in the true sense to have been a poet, for even the 
praise just quoted from Keats seems to me exaggerated ; 
but it is because of the personal charm of her character, 
the interest of her career, and its importance as a 
chapter in the literary history of the Restoration. Nor 
was she, like so many of her contemporaries, an absurd, 
or preposterous, or unclean writer : her muse was uni- 
formly pure and reasonable ; her influence, which was 
very great, was exercised wholly in favour of what was 
beautiful and good ; and if she failed, it is rather by 
the same accident by which so many poets of less in- 
telligence have unexpectedly succeeded. 

Katherine Fowler was born on New- Yearns Day, 
163 1, in a respectable cockney family of Bucklersbury. 
Of her father, who was a Presbyterian, nothing else is 
known save that he was a prosperous merchant. She 
was baptized at the font of St. Mary Woolchurch on 



The Matchless Orinda 231 

January 11, 1631. John Aubrey, the antiquary, who 
was her exact contemporary and one of her numerous 
friends, has preserved various traditions of her child- 
hood. Like Cowley, another cockney child of the 
period, she was very eager and precocious in the pur- 
suit of letters. The imaginative bias of her mind first 
took a religious form. She had read the Bible right 
through before she was five years old ; she would pray 
aloud — rather ostentatiously, - one fears — by the hour 
together, and had a potent memory for the actual text 
of the florid sermons that she heard on Sundays. At 
school she was a prodigy of application; she would 
commonly say, by heart, many chapters and passages 
of Scripture, and began at a very early age to write 
verses. As she grew old enough to form convictions 
of her own, she threw off the Presbyterian and Parlia- 
mentary traditions of her home, and announced herself 
an admirer of the Church and the King just as those 
stars were setting on the political horizon. Through 
the darkest period of the Commonwealth she remained 
stanchly Royalist; and we may fancy that she was 
well content to leave a home no longer sympathetic to 
her, when, in her seventeenth year, she married a 
Royalist gentleman of Wales, Mr. James PhiHps, of 
Cardigan Priory. 

The early part of her life as Mrs. Philips is dark to 
us. None of her letters, and but few of her poems, 
from this period have been preserved. The earliest of 
her verses form an address to her neighbour Henry 
Vaughan, the Silurist, on the publication of his Olor 
Iscanus in 165 1. These lines are interesting to the 



232 Seventeenth Century Studies 

student of versification as showing that Katherine 
Philips, from the very first, had made up her mind to 
look forwards and not backwards. There is no parti- 
cular merit in these verses, but they belong to the 
school of Waller and Denham, and prove that the 
authoress had learned very exactly the meaning of the 
new prosody. To the end of her career she never 
swerved from this path, to which her constant study 
of French poetry further encouraged her. 

She seems to have adopted the melodious pseudonym 
by which she had become known to posterity in 165 1. 
It would appear that among her friends and associates 
in and near Cardigan she instituted a Society of Friend- 
ship, to which male and female members were admitted, - 
and in which poetry, religion, and the human heart 
were to form the subjects of discussion. This society, 
chiefly, no doubt, owing to the activity of Mrs. Philips, 
became widely known, and was an object of interest to 
contemporaries. Jeremy Taylor recognised it from afar, 
and Cowley paid it elaborate compliments. In the eyes 
of Orinda it took an exaggerated importance: — 

" Nations will own us now to be 
A temple of divinity ; 
And pilgrims shall ten ages hence 
Approach our tombs with reverence," 

a prophecy which still waits to be fulfilled. On 
December 28, 165 1, Miss Anne Owen, a young lady of 
Landshipping, entered the Society under the name of 
Lucasia, it being absolutely necessary that each member 
should be known by a fancy name. The husband of 



The Matchless Orinda 233 

the poetess, for instance, is never mentioned in her 
poems or her correspondence except as An tenor. 
Lucasia was the chief ornament of the Society, and 
the affection of Orinda was laid at her feet for nearly 
thirteen years, in a style of the most unbounded and 
vivacious eulogy. It is very delightful to contemplate 
the little fat, ruddy, cockney lady, full of business and 
animation, now bustling the whole parish by the ears, 
now rousing her rather sluggish husband to ambition, 
now languishing in platonic sentiment at the feet of 
the young Welsh beauty who accepted all her raptures 
so calmly and smilingly. In Miss Owen, Mrs. Philips 
saw all that can be seen in the rarest altitudes of 
'human character. 

" Nor can morality itself reclaim 
The apostate world like my Lucasia's name : 
. . . Lucasia, whose harmonious state 
The Spheres and Muses only imitate. 
. . . So to acknowledge such vast eminence, 
Imperfect wonder is our eloquence, 
No pen Lucasia's glories can relate." 

Nor is Lucasia the only member of her little pro- 
vincial quorum of whom she predicates such brave 
things. There is Ardelia, whose real name neglectful 
posterity has forgotten to preserve; there is Miss 
Mary Aubrey, who becomes Mrs. Montague as time 
goes on, and whose poetical name is Rosania; there 
is Regina, ''that Queen of Inconstancy,'^ Mrs. John 
Collier; later on, Lady Anne Boyle begins to figure 
as '' adored Valeria," and Lady Mary Cavendish 
as ''dazzling Polycrite." The gentlemen have very 



234 Seventeenth Century Studies 

appropriate names also, though propriety prevents 
Orinda, in their cases, from celebrating friendship in 
terms of so florid an eloquence. The ** excellent 
Palaemon " was Francis Finch originally, but the name 
was transferred, as the *' noble Palaemon,'' to Jeremy 
Taylor; the ''noble Silvander," Sir Edward Bering, 
was more fortunate in preserving his name of honour ; 
and last, but not least, the elegant Sir Charles Cotterel 
achieved a sort of immortality as Orinda's greatest 
friend, under the name of Poliarchus. 

There are few collections of seventeenth century 
verse so personal as the poems of Orinda. Her 
aspirations and sentimentalities, her perplexities and 
quarrels, her little journeys and her business troubles, 
all are reflected in her verse as a mirror. She goes 
from Tenby to Bristol by sea in September 1652, and 
she gives Lucasia an account of the uneventful voyage 
in verse : — 

" But what most pleased my mind upon the way, 
Was the ships' posture that in harbour lay ; 
Which to a rocky grove so close were fixed 
That the trees' branches with the tackling mixed, — 
One would have thought it was, as then it stood, 
A growing navy or a floating wood." 

These are verses for which we have lost all taste, 
but they were quite as good as those by which Waller 
was then making himself famous, and in the same 
modern manner. These and others were handed about 
from one friend to another till they reached London, 
and gained the enthusiastic poetess literary and 
artistic friends. Among these latter were Henry 



The Matchless Orinda 235 

Lawes, the great musician, and Samuel Cooper, the 
finest miniature painter of the day, to both of whom 
she has inscribed flowing copies of verses, informed by 
her familiar stately wit. 

■But the subject that chiefly inspired her was the 
excellence of her female friends, and in treating this 
theme she really invented a new species of literature. 
She is the first sentimental writer in the English 
language, and she possesses to the full those qualities 
which came into fashion a century and a half later in 
the person of such authors as Letitia Landon. Orinda 
communes with the star$ and the mountains, and is 
deeply exercised about her own soul. . She is all 
smiles, tears, and sensibility. She asks herself if her 
affection has been slighted, she swears eternal troth, 
she yearns for confidences, she fancies that she is 
^' dying for a little love.^' With Antenor, her husband, 
she keeps up all the time a prosaic, humdrum happi- 
ness, looking after his affairs, anxious about his health, 
rather patronisingly affectionate and wifely; but her 
poetical heart is elsewhere, . and her leisure nioments 
are given up to romantic vows with Rosania and 
Lucasia, and carrespondence about the human heart 
with the noble Silvander. The whole society, one 
cannot help feeling, was entirely created and kept alive 
by the sensibility of Orinda, and nothing but her 
unremitting efforts could have sustained its component 
parts at the proper heights of sympathy. Mrs. Philips, 
in fact, had come to the conclusion that, as she put it, 
*' Men exclude women from friendship's vast capacity,'* 
and she was determined, in spite of the difliculties in 



236 Seventeenth Century Studies 

her path, to produce some shining specimens of female 
friendship. The seventeenth century was quite aston- 
ished, and looked on with respectful admiration, while 
the good Orinda laboured away, undeterred by the 
irritating circumstances that her societaires would get 
married at the very moment when they seemed ap- 
proaching perfection, and that after marriage they were 
much more difficult for her to manage than before. 

Her first great disappointment was the *' apostasy " 
of Rosania, on which occasion she lifted up her voice 
to the ^^ great soul of Friendship," and was rewarded 
by unusual response from Lucasia, on whom it is 
possible that the absence of Rosania had acted in an 
exhilarating manner. But it is time to quote some of 
those addresses to her friends by which she distin- 
guishes herself so clearly from all the writers of her 
generation, and by which she must be known in future, 
if she be known at all. After receiving one of those 
compliments from the great men of her age, which 
began to flow in upon her retirement at Cardigan, 
Orinda thus expressed her satisfaction to Lucasia, and 
stirred her up to fresh efforts of sentiment : — 

" Come, my Lucasia, since we see 

That miracles man's faith do move, 
By wonder and by prodigy 

To the dull angry world let's prove 
There's a religion in our love. 

*' We court our own captivity, — 

Than thrones more great and innocent ; 
'Twere banishment to be set free. 
Since we wear fetters whose intent 
Not bondage is, but ornament. 



The Matchless Orinda 237 

" Divided joys are tedious found, 
And griefs united easier flow ; 
We are ourselves but by rebound, 
And all our titles shuffled so, — 
Both princes, and both subjects too. 

" Our hearts are mutual victims laid. 

While they, — such power in friendship lies, — 
Are altars, priests and offerings made. 
And each heart which thus kindly dies. 
Grows deathless by the sacrifice." 

It cannot be denied that these are vigorous lines, 
full of ingenious fancy, nor were there many men then 
living in England who could surpass them. We are 
dealing with a school whose talent has evaporated, 
and we must not forget to judge such verse by the 
standards of its time. Of Milton nobody was think- 
ing; Dryden was still silent; Herrick and Wither 
had ceased to write; and it may safely be said that 
there was nothing in the lines just quoted which 
Cowley, or Waller, or Denham would have dis- 
dained to sign. Lucasia was also the theme of some 
verses which close, at all events, in a very delicate 
harmony : — 

*^ I did not live until this time 
Crowned my felicity, 
When I could say, without a crime, 
I am not Thine, but Thee. 

" For as a watch by art is wound 
To motion, such was mine ; 
But never had Orinda found 
A soul till she found thine. 



238 Seventeenth Century Studies 

" Then let our flame still light and shine, 
And no false fear control, 
As innocent as our design, 
Immortal as our soul." 

The piece which Keats admired so much that he 
took the trouble of copying it in full, was inspired by 
Miss Mary Aubrey, and may be given here as a final 
example of the manner of Orinda : — 

" I have examined and do find 

Of all that favour me. 
There's none I grieve to leave behind, 

But only, only thee : 
To part with thee I needs must die, 
Could parting separate thee and I. 

" But neither chance nor compliment 

Did element our love ; 
'Twas sacred sympathy was lent 

Us from the Quire above. 
That friendship Fortune did create 
Still fears a wound from Time or Fate. 

" Our changed and mingled souls are grown 

To such acquaintance now. 
That, if each would resume her own, 

Alas ! we know not how ; 
We have each other so engrost, 
That each is in the union lost. 

" And thus we can no absence know. 
Nor shall we be confined ; 
Our active souls will daily go 
To learn each other's mind. 
Nay, should we never meet to sense 
Our souls would hold intelligence. 



The Matchless Orinda 239 

" Inspired with a flame divine, 
I scorn to court a stay ; 
For from that noble soul of thine 
I ne'er can be away. 
. But I shall weep when thou dost grieve. 
Nor can I die whilst thou dost live. 

" By my own temper I shall guess 
At thy felicity, 
And only like thy happiness, 

Because it pleaseth thee. 
Or hearts at any time will tell 
If thou or I be sick or well. 

" All honour sure I must pretend, 

All that is good or great ; 
She that would be Rosania's friend 

Must be at least complete ; 
If I have any bravery, 
'Tis cause I have so much of thee. 

" Thy leiger soul in me shall lie. 

And all thy thoughts reveal, 
Then back again with mine shall fly, 

And thence to me shall steal ; 
Thus still to one another tend : 
Such is the sacred name of Friend. 

" Thus our twin souls in one shall grow, 

And teach the world new love, 
Redeem the age and sex, and show 

A flame Fate dares not move : 
And, courting Death to be our friend, 
Our lives too shall together end. 

" A dew shall dwell upon our tomb 

Of such a quality, 
That fighting armies thither come 

Shall reconciled be. 
We'll ask no epitaph, but say, 
Orinda and Rosania." 



240 Seventeenth Century Studies 

For ten years Katherine Philips continued to live 
at Cardigan in the midst of this enthusiastic circle of 
friends, and in a social quiet that was broken only by 
her own agitations of spirit. In 1654, ^^ the seventh 
year of her marriage, she bore her first child, a son 
who was named Hector, and who lived only forty days. 
She bewails his loss in many verses, which are not the 
less affecting because they are stiff in form. She was 
ultimately consoled for her boy^s death by the birth of 
a girl, who survived her, and eventually married a 
Mr. Wogan, of Pembrokeshire. It is unfortunate that 
we cannot trace the course of Orinda's intimacy with 
Jeremy Taylor, although it is most probable that he 
visited her Society at Cardigan during the years that 
he lived near to her in Carmarthenshire. At all 
events, when, in 1659, he dedicated his Discourse on 
the Nature^ Offices^ and Measures of Friendship to 
'*the most ingenious and excellent Mrs. Katherine 
Philips,^^ he paid her the most delicate and affectionate 
compliments, and showed himself well acquainted with 
the tenor of her mind. His treatise was, indeed, a 
public testimony, from a man of the highest authority, 
to the success with which she had proved women to be 
capable of the serene and exalted virtue of friendship. 

This tribute from the famous Bishop of Down and 
Connor inaugurated that , brief period during which 
Orinda ceased to be a provincial notoriety, and became 
for the small remainder of her life a prominent figure in 
contemporary society. At the Restoration she sang out 
loud and clear, in strains that were proved to be sincere 
by her long and unflinching resistance to the Common- 



The Matchless Orinda 241 

wealth. As Arion she goes forth to meet his Majesty 
upon a dolphin : — 

" Whom does this stately navy bring ? 
O, 'tis Great Britain's glorious King ! 
Convey him then, ye Winds and Seas, 
Swift as desire and calm as peace. 
Charles and his mighty hopes you bear ; 
A greater now than Caesar's here. 
Whose veins a richer purple boast 
Than ever hero's yet engrossed, 
Sprung from a father so august 
He triumphs in his very dust." 

She hails the fine weather for the coronation as a 
'^ bright parenthesis " placed by Heaven itself between 
two storms of rain, and she indites separate copies of 
verses to all the ladies of the royal family. Soon the 
Duchess of York becomes aware of this ardent poetess 
in the West, and commands her to send some speci- 
mens of her poems ; and in a little time we find Orinda^ 
unable to stay at Cardigan when the world of London 
had suddenly become so distractingly interesting, on 
a visit to town. We find her the guest of Cowley at 
Barn Elms, and invited to inscribe her name on one 
of his ancient trees. And at the close of this visit to 
London in 1661 she suddenly becomes vividly present 
to us for the rest of her life. 

We have already mentioned her friendship for Sir 
Charles Cotterel, whom she named Ppliarchus. He 
was a Royalist courtier of great elegance and erudition, 
who had long been steward to the Queen of Bohemia, 
and was now master of the ceremonies at the Court of 
Charles H. He dabbled gracefully in Hterature, was a 

Q 



242 Seventeenth Century Studies 

very accomplished linguist, and long after the death of 
Orinda achieved an ephemeral reputation as the trans- 
lator of the novels of La Calprenede. He survived 
Katherine Philips nearly a quarter of a century, dying 
in 1687, and what then became of his collection of her 
letters does not appear. In 1705, however, forty years 
after her death, Bernard Lintott published, without any 
bibliographical information, forty-eight Letters from 
Orinda to Poliarchus^ which are not only extremely 
well written and vivacious, but full of autobiographical 
matter, and amply furnished with dates. By means of 
these letters we can follow Orinda closely through the 
last and most interesting months of her life. 

The first letter is dated from Acton, Dec. i, 1661. 
She has come up to London to prosecute some business 
for her husband, and is staying with his brother, to the 
members of whose family she had at various occasions 
indited poems. Sir Charles Cotterel has paid her a 
visit, in the course of which he has confided to her his 
hopeless passion for a lady named Calanthe, and she 
is full of concern for his peace of mind. Mr. Matthew 
Arnold has pointed out how suddenly the prose of the 
Restoration threw off* its traditional involutions and false 
ornament, and became in a great measure the prose that 
we wish to use to-day. The Letters of Orinda form a, 
singular instance of the truth of this criticism, and com- 
pare very favourably with such letters as those of Howel 
in point of simplicity of style. Thus, for instance, she 
refers to Sir Charles Cotterel's agitation of mind : — 

" The great disturbance you were in when you went hence, 
and the high and just concern I have for you, have made me 



The Matchless Orinda 243 

take the resolution to trouble you with my most humble and 
earnest request to resist the attempts your present passion is 
like to make on your quiet, before it grows too imperious to be 
checked by the powers of either reason or friendship. There is 
nothing more easy than to captivate one's self to love or grief, 
and no more evident mark of a great soul than to avoid those 
bondages. I hope, therefore, you will not think it altogether 
unbecoming the friendship you have given me leave to profess 
for you, to entreat you to overcome those passions, and not give 
way to melancholy, which will unhinge your excellent temper, 
and bring so great a cloud on the happiness of your friends. 
Consider for how many important interests you are responsible, 
and exert all the powers of reason with which your excellent 
judgment abounds, to shake off your sorrows, and live cheer- 
fully and long the delight of all who have the honour of your 
acquaintance." 

Calanthe had been in correspondence with Orinda, 
and that faithless confidante had shown her letters to 
Poliarchus, hence many entreaties that her weakness 
may not be divulged to the injured fair. It is plain 
that Orinda greatly enjoyed her position as go-between 
in this interesting love affair, which, however, very 
shortly languished, and left upon the ensuing corre- 
spondence only this trace, that Sir Charles Cotterel 
having written such passages in his letters to Orinda 
as were not to be read by Calanthe in Itahan, Orinda 
was obliged to learn that language, to which, indeed, 
she forthwith gave herself very assiduously. Her visit 
to London came to an end in March 1662, and she 
wrote to Poliarchus a sprightly letter from Gloucester 
on her return journey. A very interesting letter, dated 
Cardigan Priory, March i8th, announced her return. 
She found Wales exceedingly dull at first, after the 



244 Seventeenth Century Studies 

pleasures of courtly and literary society in London. 
She complained that she could not find any satisfaction 
in *'my beloved rocks and rivers, formerly my best 
entertainment," and she longed to be able once more 
to enjoy Sir Charles CottereFs conversation, which was 
to her *' above all the flights of panegyrick." Her one 
consolation was that the faithful Lucasia was still at 
Cardigan, though threatening every day to be gone 
to her own home. Descending to mundane things, 
poor Orinda confessed that she had been much disap- 
pointed in the condition of her husband. He is dull, 
apathetic, and depressed, was roused to no interest 
by her account of the conduct of his affairs in 
London, and terrifies her by his absolute indifference 
to business. From the sluggishness of Antenor she 
turns again to the pleasures of literature, and by an 
amusing affectation characteristic of the school she 
belonged to, she tells Poliarchus that she is reading 
English books with patience and French ones with 
pleasure. 

She spent the month of April with her beloved friend 
at Landshipping,.but, alas ! the hour of the apostasy of 
Lucasia was approaching. While Orinda was amusing 
herself with the idea that Poliarchus was showing her 
poems at Court, and while she was signing herself to 
him *'more than all the world besides your faithful 
Valentine," Miss Anne Owen was herself accepting a 
valentine in a less platonic sense. It seems to have 
all happened at Landshipping under the very nose of 
Orinda, without attracting the attention of that active 
creature. When at last she found it out, she was 



The Matchless Orinda 245 

beside herself with chagrin and indignation. The 
bridegroom was a son of Sir Thomas Hanmer, and 
the match was one thoroughly approved of by both 
families. Orinda, as she says herself, "alone of all 
the company was out of humour ; nay, I was vexed to 
that degree that I could not disguise my concern, 
which many of them were surprised to see, and spoke 
to me of it ; but my grief was too deeply rooted to be 
cured with words." Her position, indeed, was a very 
trying one ; nor ought we to smile at the disappoint- 
ment of this worthy little lady, who had worshipped a 
divinity so long only to find her suddenly composed of 
common clay. 

The event was certainly hurried, for before the 
middle of May Lucasia was married, Orinda mean- 
while indulging herself in transports of jealousy, and 
in long correspondence on the subject with Rosania 
and Poliarchus. When the young people were actually 
married, Orinda remained with them at Landship- 
ping, and when they prepared to go over to Ireland, 
where the bride's new home was, she announced 
her intention of accompanying them. The vigilance 
of friendship, however, was not the only or the main 
cause of this determination. There were several 
suits to be tried in Dublin, involving heavy gains or 
losses to her husband, and as he could by no means 
be roused to an interest in these, Mrs. PhiHps re- 
solved to undertake them herself. On July 19th, 
1662, she writes from Rosstrevor, in County Down, 
where she had been enjoying the society of Jeremy 
Taylor, who had been settled something less than two 



246 Seventeenth Century Studies 

years in his diocese. This august companionship 
did not prevent Orinda from exercising a sharp super- 
vision over the newly married pair. She informs 
PoHarchus, in a strain of the finest unconscious humour, 
that she beHeves the bridegroom to be of a most stub- 
born and surly humour, although, *' to speak sincerely, 
she has not been able hitherto to detect in him the 
marks of any ill nature/' and what exasperates her 
most of all, in her character of the social banshee, is 
that Lucasia herself '' pretends to be the most satisfied 
creature in the world.'' 

In July 1662, Mrs. Philips began what was evidently 
the happiest year of her life by taking up her abode 
in Dublin. At the Restoration the great difficulty of 
settling the claims of those Irish gentlemen who de- 
manded the King's favour, and the endless litigations 
respecting the forfeited lands in Ireland, brought over 
to Dublin a large company of distinguished lawyers 
with their families, and gave the city a temporary show 
and glitter. It was many years before affairs were in 
any degree arranged, and the English colony in Dubhn 
settled down to enjoy themselves as best they might* 
Orinda found herself thrown at once into the distin- 
guished company which gathered round the Lord- 
Lieutenant, the great first Duke of Ormonde, and she 
received an exceptionally warm welcome in the family 
of the Countess of Cork. Of all the Boyles, however^ 
at that moment, the most influential was Roger, Earl 
of Orrery, whose enthusiastic admiration for Orinda 
displayed itself at once in every species of compliment 
and hospitality. He was eminent alike as a soldier, 



The Matchless Orinda 247 

a statesman, and a poet, was one of the most influen- 
tial men in the three kingdoms, and at that moment 
was engaged in Ireland upon a most arduous and 
painful office. He had just been appointed Lord Chief- 
Justice of Ireland under the Duke of Ormonde, and 
his friendship was not merely flattering and agreeable 
to Orinda, but extremely advantageous. He placed 
her among the ladies of his family, obtained for her 
the protection and personal friendship of Lady Cork, 
and in fact did all that was possible to make her stay 
in Dublin pleasant. 

Another distinguished person with whom she swore 
eternal friendship in Dublin was the young Earl of 
Roscommon, not yet famous as the author of the 
Essay on Translated Verse^ and indeed only twenty- 
eight years of age, but already looked upon as a patron 
of poetry, and as a very agreeable and eligible bachelor, 
'* distempered,^' unfortunately, "with a fatal affection 
for play." Another Dublin acquaintance was James 
Tyrell, the politician and historian; yet another was 
John Ogilby, a man belonging to a generation earlier 
than all these, who had successfully outwitted Sir 
William Davenant, and had contrived to persuade 
Charles II. to send him out to Dublin as Master of 
the Revels. Ogilby is still sometimes remembered as 
the translator of the Odyssey and of the ^neid. That 
Orinda impressed all these persons with a great sense 
of her intellectual power and moral excellence, is 
evident from the nature of the eulogies they poured 
upon her while she lived and long after she died. 
When a man in the position of Lord Orrery says in 



248 Seventeenth Century Studies 

print of a little plain Welsh lady of the middle 
class — 

" Madam, when I but knew you by report, 
I feared the praises of the admiring Court 
Were but their compliments, but now I must 
Confess, what I thought civil is scarce just" — 

we may be sure that he is trying to express with 
sincerity a very genuine admiration. Nor is the Earl 
of Roscommon, who addresses her as '' Dear Friend/^ 
less sincere, though more ridiculous, when he states it 
to be his experience that when he meets hungry wolves 
in the Scythian snows, 

" The magic of Orinda's name 

Not only can their fierceness tame, 
But, if that mighty word I once rehearse, 
They seem submissively to roar in verseP 

On one of the earliest occasions upon which Mrs. 
Philips met Lord Orrery, in August 1662, she ven- 
tured to show him her latest effusion, a scene she had 
translated from the third act of Corneille^s tragedy of 
Pompee, Orrery admired it excessively, and laid his 
entreaties, almost his commands, upon her to complete 
it in the same style — that is, in rhymed heroic verse. 
She set to work and completed the task, a very con- 
siderable one, by the middle of October. She found 
that it relieved her, in combination with select passages 
from Seneca and Epictetus, from absolutely breaking 
her heart over Lucasia, whose husband at last insisted 
on taking her back to their house at Rosstrevor. 
Orinda, ensconced in her snug nest of quality at 



The Matchless Orinda 249 

Dublin, full of literary ambition, and scribbling day 
and night at Poinpey^ seems to have missed her friend 
as little as could be expected. She was treated as a 
very great celebrity; and when she had occasion to 
hand round some manuscript verses which Cowley 
had just sent her for approval, she must have felt that 
her cup of literary importance was full. 

Thus caressed by Lady Cork and complimented by 
all the lettered earls, she passed the months of August 
and September 1662 in a sort of golden dream, 
scarcely finding time, amid all her avocations, to write 
a hasty letter to the devoted Poliarchus, to whom, 
however, Pompey was sent in quick instalments. She 
gives him an interesting account, in October, of the 
theatre which the new master of the revels, Ogilby, 
was building at Dublin — a theatre that cost ;^2000 to 
put up. She holds it to be much finer than Davenant's 
in London ; and she is present when the season opens 
with a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher^s comedy 
of Wit without Money, As soon as the rough draft 
of Pompey was finished, she busied herself with her 
husband^s affairs — '^ putting in Antenor's claim as an 
adventurer in my father's right here in Ireland '' — and 
this, with two other minor lawsuits, occupies her spare 
time until the summer of the ensuing year. Her most 
serious attention, however, settles upon Pompey, Sir 
Charles Cotterel takes so much interest in it that she 
says, ''I look on you as more a friend to me than 
David was to Jonathan ; " but she shows a little temper 
when he offers some verbal criticism. For instance, 
and this is interesting historically, he objects to the 



250 Seventeenth Century Studies 

word effort as not English, and she repHes that it has 
been naturaHsed here these twelve years. She might 
have added that Cotgrave had included it in his 
dictionary, in 1660. 

Orinda spent the winter of 1662 at Dublin, touching 
up the text of Pompey^ writing songs for it, and having 
them put to music — not without regret that her friend, 
the great Henry Lawes, who died just as the first 
manuscript of the play reached London, could not 
adorn them with immortal strains. Lord Orrery, who 
looked upon himself as the ^'onlie begetter" of this 
tragedy, moved heaven and earth to bring it out upon 
the stage ; and, when Ogilby had made arrangements 
for its representation. Orrery spent ;^IOO out of his 
own pocket to buy handsome Egyptian and Roman 
dresses and bring out the tragedy in style. It was 
dedicated to his mother. Lady Cork. Lord Roscommon 
wrote the prologue, and Sir Edward Dering the 
epilogue; each of them so ordered their verses that 
they should be delivered by the actor while turning 
to the Duke of Ormonde's box. New dances and a 
masque were introduced here and there by Ogilby, 
and on the second week of February 1663 it was 
finally presented to the public. It enjoyed an un- 
bounded success ; but, unfortunately, the letter in 
which Mrs. Philips gave Sir Charles Cotterel an 
account of the performance has not been preserved. 
Her friends, however, pressed her to print the play^ 
and from the success which attended this experiment 
we may judge of the reception of the piece on the 
boards. An edition of five hundred was printed, a 



The Matchless Orinda 251 

single packet only being sent to London, and in a 
fortnight the whole of the impression was sold. In 
London the demand was so great, that hardly had the 
few copies sent arrived at the capital, than Mr. Herring- 
man, the poets' publisher in those early days of the 
Restoration, wrote to ask Orinda's leave to bring out 
a London edition. 

Meanwhile, Orinda had certain literary experiences. 
She made the acquaintance of Samuel Tuke, whose 
very successful play, the Adventures of Five Hours ^ 
was awakening delusive hopes of a great new dra- 
matist ; and she welcomed in Hudibras the advent of 
one much greater than Tuke. Her first impulse of 
criticism was that which the world has endorsed: ^*In 
my life I never read anything so naturally and so 
knowingly burlesque." In May, her troubles as an 
authoress began. A miscellany of poems by living 
writers appeared, in which some of her lyrics were 
pirated and widely advertised; and her serenity was 
shaken, a week or two later, by the fact that two 
London publishers were quarrelling for Pompey^ and 
did, in fact, bring out, in the month of June, two 
simultaneous editions of that lucky play. And now it 
came to her knowledge that, while she had been thus 
busily employed, she had cut the ground from under 
the feet of some of the most celebrated wits of the 
day; for Waller had set his heart on translating 
Pompee^ and had finished one act before Orinda's 
version was heard of. The other four acts had been 
supplied by Sir Edward Fillmore, Sir Charles Sedley, 
and the young men who were afterwards known as 



252 Seventeenth Century Studies 

the Earls of Dorset and Middlesex. As early as 
January 1663 it was announced that this translation 
was complete and immediately to appear. The success, 
however, of the Irish version checked the London one; 
and Orinda, hearing nothing of her illustrious rivals, 
became frightened, and wrote to Waller a letter depre- 
cating his anger. His reply, which reached her early 
in June, reassured her ; the courtly poet was character- 
istically smooth, courteous, and obliging, and, if he 
felt annoyance, contrived most wittily to avoid the 
show of it. At last, on July 16, 1663, having gained 
the two most important of her three suits, Mrs. Philips 
set sail from Dubhn to Milford, and went home to 
her husband at Cardigan after an absence of exactly 
twelve months. 

She found the excellent Antenor much improved in 
health, and she settled down to spend the autumn and 
winter at home. Her new importance as a woman of 
letters, and her large London correspondence, how- 
ever, exposed her to a fresh annoyance. The post- 
master at Carmarthen scandalously neglected his 
duty, and letters were constantly delayed and lost. 
The gentry of the neighbourhood, however, stirred up 
by the ever-energetic Orinda, sent in a memorial to 
O'Neil, the Postmaster-General, and the indolence at 
Carmarthen received a sharp reprimand. She found 
the winter tedious after her happy life at Dublin ; she 
does not complain, but her letters to Sir Charles 
Cotterel are dejected in tone, and her appeals to her 
friends to find something in London for her husband 
to do are constant and pathetic. And now another 



The Matchless Orinda 253 

annoyance occurred. A piratical London publisher 
managed to obtain copies of all her miscellaneous 
poems, which she had refused to print, and brought 
them out surreptitiously in November 1663, the title- 
page dated 1664. Her friends wrote to her to condole, 
but did not send her the book, and her anxiety and 
vexation, combined with the rumour that the verses 
were very incorrectly printed, threw her into a sharp 
attack of illness. The volume, however, is not parti- 
cularly incorrect, and it was prefaced by an ode of 
Cowley^s which should have been balm to the breast of 
the wounded poetess. In it that eminent rhetorician, 
speaking in the consciousness of his enormous prestige, 
addressed her in terms of the highest and most affec- 
tionate eulogy, and contrived to throw into one stanza, 
at least, of his encomiastic ode, some of the most 
delicately felicitous compliments that a poet ever 
addressed to a sister in Apollo : — 

" Thou dost my wonder, would'st my envy raise, 
If to be praised I loved more than to praise ; 
I must admire to see thy well-knit sense, 
Thy numbers gentle, and thy fancies high, 
These as thy forehead smooth, these sparkling as thine eye. 
'Tis solid and 'tis manly all. 
Or rather, 'tis angelical ! 
For, as in angels, we 
Do in thy verses see 
Both improved sexes eminently meet, — 
They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet." 

In January 1664 she took in hand another play of 
Corneille's, and that the one most popular in England 
through his lifetime — Horace, It had been translated 



254 Seventeenth Century Studies 

before, by Sir William Lower, in 1656, and was 
attempted later on by Charles Cotton, in 1671. Orinda 
worked slowly at this, and brought four acts of it, all 
she was destined to complete, with her when she came 
to London in March. She was absolutely unable to 
stay any longer in suspense, and she thought that her 
energy and influence might secure some post for her 
husband if she came right up to town. The last three 
months of her life were brilliantly spent ; she was 
warmly welcomed at court and in the best society. 
Her last verses, signed June 10, 1664, were addressed 
in terms of affectionate respect to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury. They breathe the old ardour, the old 
moral elevation, the old eager note of the enthusiastic 
Orinda. Twelve days later she was dead, a victim to 
smallpox, that frightful disease to which the science 
of the day saw no hope of resistance. She had but 
half completed her thirty-fourth year. She was buried 
under a great slab in the church of St. Bennet 
Sherehog, among the remains of her ancestors. 

Thus, in the middle of a brilliant social and literary 
success, the abhorred shears slipped in and cut the 
thread. The memory of the matchless Orinda was 
celebrated in numberless odes. All the Royalist poets 
combined to do her honour. Cowley mourned her in 
a massive lyric. Denham demanded the privilege of 
concluding her Horace. Her name was mentioned 
with those of Sappho and Corinna, and language was 
used without reproach which might have seemed a 
little fulsome if addressed to the Muse herself. 

For half a century Orinda was an unquestioned light 



The Matchless Orinda 255 

in English song; then she sank into utter darkness. 
But her memory is worthy of some judicious revival. 
She presents us with a clearly defined and curious 
type of the Hterary woman, and there are few such 
in our early literature. She secured the affectionate 
esteem of the principal people of her time, and we 
know enough of her character to see that she could 
not but secure it ; and if she sinned against poetry, as 
we understand it, much may be forgiven her, for she 
loved it much. 



Fifteen years after the death of Orinda there was 
published in London a volume of Female Poems, 
which now forms one of the rarest books of the 
Restoration. This Httle volume was anonymous, but 
was said to be ''written by Ephelia," and we are / 
told that Ephelia was a certain Miss Joan Philips. l/ 
do not know whether I start too wild a theory when^ 
I acknowledge that it has several times crossed my 
mind that Ephelia may have been Orinda^s only 
daughter, who, as we have said, eventually married a 
Mr. Wogan, of Pembrokeshire. This daughter seems 
to have been born about 1656, and accordingly would 
be twenty-three in 1679. The portrait of Ephelia 
affixed to her poems, and the description she gives of 
her person would tally closety enough with this hypo- 
thesis ; and she expressly speaks of herself as deprived 
of her parents in early life, and as having soon after 
lost the property which they bequeathed to her. 
However this may be, the poems of Joan Philips are 



256 Seventeenth Century Studies 

closely modelled upon those of Katherine Philips, even 
to the form of her addresses to royalty and to the 
enthusiastic pseudonyms which she gives to her 
friends. That she does not refer to any such relation- 
ship would be amply accounted for by her desire to 
conceal her name, which the extremely confidential 
nature of her effusions made imperative. Her little 
book deserves mention as an appendix to Orinda^s, 
not merely because it may be written by a relation 
and is certainly quite unknown to students, but also 
on account of its inherent merit. It is a sincere page 
out of the heart of a human being — a series of con- 
fessions so true and so poignant that we seem to hear 
a living voice across two centuries. In its warmth 
and vivacity, its womanly passion and subtlety, I know 
no utterance like it except the sonnets of Louise Labe. 
A real human voice is so rare in Restoration literature, 
that we may listen for a few moments to this not very 
tuneful one. 

Ephelia tells us her story without any maidenly 
reserve, but with a great deal of nature. Her earliest 
poems show her, as Orinda had been before her, 
enslaved to a circle of fair friends of her own sex. 
One day she meets Strephon, or J. G., whose surname 
appears from an acrostic to have been Gilbert, and 
she falls in love with him at first sight. He is much 
older than she, and does not for some time respond to 
her passion ; but by degrees he melts to he!*, and they 
are engaged to be married. J. G., however, is offered 
a valuable appointment in the factory at Tangiers, and 
he rides away under her bower-eaves, like a false 



The Matchless Orinda 257 

knight in a ballad, and sets sail without even bidding 
her farewell. She hears first a rumour that he is 
paying court to a lady of wealth in Morocco, and then 
that he had married This, *'the best-born among the 
Afric maids/' Ephelia loudly bewails her fate and 
Strephon's unkindness, and presents the public with 
a volume of poems in which every shade of emotion, 
as it passed through her mind, has been conscientiously 
transferred to verse. The result is extraordinary. 

Joan Philips is a very unequal writer, but at her 
best she attains some undeniable vigour in the use of 
the heroic couplet. The following example gives as 
good an impression of her style as the reader can 
require ; it is a passage inspired by the first suspicion 
of J. G.'s unfaithfulness : — 

" Why do I love ? go, ask the glorious sun 
Why every day it round the world doth run ; 
Ask Thames and Tiber, why they ebb and flow ; 
Ask damask roses, why in June they blow ; 
Ask ice and hail, the reason why they're cold ; 
Decaying beauties, why they will grow old ; 
They'll tell thee, fate, that everything doth move, 
Inforces them to this, and me to love. 
There is no reason for our love or hate, 
'Tis irresistible as Death or Fate ; 
'Tis not his face ; I've seen enough to see 
That is not good, though doted on by me ; 
Nor is't his tongue that has this conquest won, 
For that at least is equalled by my own ; 
His carriage can to none obliging be, 
'Tis rude, affected, full of vanity, 
Strangely ill-natured, peevish and unkind, 
Unconstant, false, to jealousy inclined ; 
His temper could not have so great a power, 
'Tis mutable and changes every hour ; 

R 



258 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Those vigorous years, that women so adore, 
Are past in him, he's twice my age and more ; 
And yet I love this false, this worthless man 
With all the passion that a woman can. 
Dote on his imperfections, though I spy 
Nothing to love, I love, and know not why. 
Save 'tis decreed in the dark book of fate. 
That I should love, and he should be ingrate." 

The artificial accent of the age is entirely absent 
here, as elsewhere in Ephelia, and her couplets are not 
without vigour. Dry den's Aureng-Zebe had not been 
acted without profit to the ear of this young lady, who 
might, one fancies, under proper training, have become 
a genuine poet. She mentions Waller and Cowley with 
enthusiasm, and addresses a copy of rhymes to Aphra 
Behn, complimenting her on her ''strenuous polite 
verses.*' In all this she is the child of her age. But 
her misfortunes, her amazing frankness in the analysis 
of her feelings, and the possibility that she was Orinda's 
daughter, lift her out of the region of commonplace. 

1881. 

There was a second edition of Ephelia's Poems^ for 
a knowledge of which I am indebted to the courtesy of 
Mr. Edward H. Bierstadt, of New York. It consists 
of the sheets of the first edition, with a new title dated 
1682, and twenty-eight additional leaves at the end 
containing thirty-two new poems. At least nine of 
these additional poems are taken from the first (1680) 
edition of Rochester, and many of the others are of 
such a character as to make us hope that the chaste 
Ephelia not merely did not write, but never read them. 



SIR GEORGE ETHEREDGE 

THAT Sir George Etheredge wrote three plays 
which are now even less read than the rank and 
file of Restoration drama, and that he died at 
Ratisbon, at an uncertain date, by falling down the 
stairs of his own house and breaking his neck after a 
banquet, these are the only particulars which can be 
said to be known, even to students of literature, con- 
cerning the career of a very remarkable writer. I 
shall endeavour to show in the following pages that 
the entire neglect of the three plays is an unworthy 
return for the singular part they enjoyed in the creation 
of modern Enghsh comedy; and I shall be able to 
prove that the one current anecdote of Etheredge's life 
has no foundation in fact whatever. At the same time 
I shall have the satisfaction of printing, mainly for the 
first time, and from manuscript sources, a mass of 
biographical material which makes this dramatist, 
hitherto the shadowiest figure of his time, perhaps the 
poet of the Restoration of whose life and character we 
know the most. 

The information I refer to has been culled from two 
or three fields. Firstly, from the incidental references 

to the author scattered in the less-known writings of 

259 



26o Seventeenth Century Studies 

his contemporaries ; secondly, from an article published 
in 1750, and from manuscript notes still unprinted, 
both from the pen of that '^ busy, curious, thirsty fly ^' 
of polite letters, the antiquarian Oldys; but mostly, 
and with far the greatest confidence, from a volume in 
the Manuscript Room of the British Museum, entitled 
The Letterbook of Sir George Etheredge, while he was 
Envoy Extraordinary at Ratisbon. This volume, which 
is in the handwriting of an unnamed secretary, contains 
drafts of over one hundred letters from Etheredge, in 
English and French, a certain number of letters 
addressed to him by famous persons, some of his 
accounts, a hudibrastic poem on his character, and, 
finally, some extremely caustic letters, treacherously 
written by the secretary, to bring his master into bad 
odour in England. I cannot understand how so very 
curious and important a miscellany has hitherto been 
overlooked. It was bought by the British Museum in 
1837, and, as far as I can find out, has been never 
referred to, or made use of in any way. It abounds 
with historical and literary allusions of great interest, 
and, as far as Etheredge is concerned, is simply a 
mine of wealth. Having premised so much, I will 
endeavour to put together, as concisely as pos- 
sible, what I have been able to collect from all these 
sources. 

On January 9, 1686, Etheredge addressed to the 
Earl of Middleton an epistle in octosyllabics, which 
eventually, in 1704, was printed in his Works. 
Readers of Dryden will recollect that a letter in 
verse to Sir George Etheredge by that ;poet has 



Sir George Etheredge 261 

always been included in Dryden^s poems, and that 
it begins : — 

" To you who live in chill degree, 
As map informs, of fifty-three, 
And do not much for cold atone 
By bringing thither fifty-one." 

That Etheredge was fifty-one at the date of this 
epistle has hitherto been of little service to us, since 
we could not tell when that letter was composed. 
The Letterbookf however, in giving us the date of 
Etheredge^s epistle, to which Dryden^s poem was an 
immediate answer, supplies us with an important item. 
If Etheredge was fifty-one in the early spring of 1686, 
he must have been born in 1634, or the first months 
of 163 5. He was, therefore, a contemporary of Dryden, 
Roscommon, and Dorset, rather than, as has always 
been taken for granted, of the younger generation of 
Wycherley, Shadwell, and Rochester. Nothing is 
certainly known of his family. Gildon, who knew him, 
reported that he belonged to an old Oxfordshire family. 
He was at school at Thame, and, therefore, may pro- 
bably have been a descendant of Dr. George Etheredge, 
the famous Greek and Hebrew scholar, who died about 
1590, and whose family estate was at that town. A 
Captain George Etheredge, who was prominent among 
the early planters of the Bermudas Islands from 161 5 
to 1630, was presumably the poet^s father. Oldys very 
vaguely conjectures that he was educated at Cambridge. 
Gildon states that for a little while he studied the law, 
but adds, what external and internal evidence combine 
to prove, that he spent much of his early manhood in 



262 Seventeenth Century Studies 

France. My own impression is that from about 1658 
to 1663 he was principally in Paris. His French, in 
prose and verse, is as fluent as his English ; and his 
plays are full of allusions that show him to be inti- 
mately at home in Parisian matters. What in the 
other Restoration playwrights seems a Gallic affecta- 
tion seems nature in him. My reason for supposing 
that he did not arrive in London at the Restoration, 
but a year or two later, is that he appears to have 
been absolutely unknown in London until his Comical 
Revenge was acted; and also that he shows in this 
play an acquaintance with the new school of French 
comedy. He seems to have possessed means of his 
own, and to have lived a thoroughly idle life, without 
aim or ambition, until, in 1664, it occurred to him, in 
his thirtieth year, to write a play. 

At any critical moment in the development of a 
literature, events follow one another with such head- 
long speed, that I must be forgiven if I am a little tire-, 
some about the sequence of dates. According to all 
the bibliographers, old and new, Etheredge's earliest 
publication was She Would if She Could, 1668, im- 
mediately followed by The Corniced Revenge, first 
printed in 1669. If this were the case, the claim of 
Etheredge to critical attention would be comparatively 
small. Oldys, however, mentions that he had heard 
of, but never seen, an edition of this latter play of 
1664. Neither Langbaine, Gildon, nor any of their 
successors believe in the existence of such a quarto, 
nor is a copy to be found in the British Museum. How- 
ever, I have been so fortunate as to pick up two copies 



Sir George Etheredge 263 

of this mythical quarto of 1664,* the main issue of 
which I suppose to have been destroyed by some one 
of the many accidents that befell London in that decade, 
and Etheredge's precedence of all his more eminent 
comic contemporaries is thus secured. 

The importance of this date, 1664, is rendered still 
more evident when we consider that it constitutes a 
claim for its author for originaHty in two distinct kinds. 
The Co7nical Revenge^ or Love in a Tub, which was 
acted at the Duke of York's Theatre in Lincoln's Inn 
Fields, in the summer of 1664, is a tragi-comedy, of 
which the serious portions are entirely written in 
rhymed heroics, and the comic portions in prose. The 
whole question of the use of rhyme in English drama 
has been persistently misunderstood, and its history 
misstated. In Mr. George Saintsbury's life of Dryden, 
for the first time, the subject receives due critical atten- 
tion, and is approached with the necessary equipment. 
But while I thoroughly agree with Mr. Saintsbury's 
view of the practice, I think something may be added 
from the purely historical side. The fashion of rhyme 
in the drama, then, to be exact, flourished from 1664 
until Lee and Dryden returned to blank verse in 1678. 
Upon this it suddenly languished, and after being occa- 
sionally used until the end of the century, found its last 
example in Sedley's Beauty the Conqueror, published 
in 1702. The customary opinion that both rhymed 
dramatic verse and the lighter form of comedy were 
introduced simultaneously with the Restoration is one 

* I have also in my collection an issue of 1667, so that the edition 
of 1669 must really be the third, and not the first. 



264 Seventeenth Century Studies 

of those generalisations which are easily made and 
slavishly repeated, but which fall before the slightest 
historical investigation. When the drama was re- 
organised in 1660, it reappeared in the old debased 
forms, without the least attempt at novelty. Brome 
and Shirley had continued to print their plays during 
the Commonwealth, and in Jasper Mayne had found 
a disciple who united, without developing, their merits 
or demerits. During the first years of the Restoration 
the principal playwrights were Porter, a sort of third- 
rate Brome, Killigrew, an imitator of Shirley, Stapylton, 
an apparently lunatic person, and Sir William Lower, 
to whom is due the praise of having studied French 
contemporary literature with great zeal, and of having 
translated Corneille and Quinault. 

Wherever these poetasters ventured into verse, they 
displayed such an incompetence as has never before 
or since disgraced any coterie of considerable writers. 
Their blank verse was simply inorganic, their serious 
dialogue a sort of insanity, their comedy a string of 
pothouse buffooneries and preposterous ''humours." 
Dryden, in his Wild Gallant j and a very clever drama- 
tist, Wilson, who never fulfilled his extraordinary 
promise, tried, in 1663, to revive the moribund body of 
comedy, but always in the style of Ben Jonson ; and 
finally, in 1664, came the introduction of rhymed 
dramatic verse. For my own part, I frankly confess 
^hat I think it was the only course that it was possible 
I to take. The blank iambics of the romantic dramatists 
4 had become so execrably weak and distended, the 
I whole movement of dramatic verse had grown so flaccid, 



Sir George Etheredge 265 

that a little restraint in the severe limits of rhyme was 
absolutely necessary. It has been too rashly taken for 
granted that we owe the introduction of the new form 
to Dryden. It is true that in the 1664 preface to The 
Rival Ladies^ a play produced on the boards in the 
winter of 1663, Dryden recommends the use of rhyme 
in heroic plays, and this fact, combined with the little 
study given to Dryden's dramas, has led the critics to 
take for granted that that play is written in rhyme. A 
glance at the text will show that this is a mistake. 
The Rival Ladies is written in blank verse, and only 
two short passages of dialogue in the third act exhibit 
the timid way in which Dryden tested the ear of the 
public. 

Of course lyrical pas.sages in all plays, and the main 
part of masques, such as the pastorals of Day, had, 
even in the Elizabethan age, been written in deca- 
syllabic rhymed verse ; but these exceptions are as 
little to the point as is the example under which Dryden 
shelters himself. The Siege of Rhodes, This piece was 
/an opera, and therefore naturally in rhyme. As a 
I point of fact Dryden was the first to propose, and 
c/' Etheredge the first to carry out, the experiment of 
v/riting ordinary plays in rhyme. Encouraged by the 
preface to The Rival Ladies^ and urged on by the 
alexandrines he was accustomed to listen to on the 
French stage, Etheredge put the whole serious part of 
his Comical Revenge into dialogue, of which this piece 
from the duel scene is an example : — 

" Bruce, Brave men ! this action makes it well appear 
'Tis honour and not envy brings you here. 



266 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Beaufort. We come to conquer, Bruce, and not to see 
Such villains rob us of our victory ; 
Your lives our fatal swords claim as their due. 
We'd wronged ourselves had we not righted you. 

Bruce, Your generous courage has obliged us so. 
That to your succour we our safety owe. 

Lovzs, You've done what men of honour ought to do, 
What in your cause we would have done for you. 

Beaufort, You speak the truth, we've but our duty done ; 
Prepare ; duty's no obligation. \_He strips. 

None come into the field to weigh what's right. 
This is no place for counsel, but for fight." 

And so on. The new style was at once taken up by 
the Howards, Killigrews, and Orrerys, and became, as 
we have seen, the rage for at least fourteen years. 

But the serious portion of The Comical Revenge is 
not worth considering in comparison with the value of 
the prose part. In the underplot, the gay, realistic 
scenes which give the play its sub-title of the '* Tale of 
a Tub," Etheredge virtually founded English comedy, 
as it was successively understood by Congreve, Gold- 
smith, and Sheridan. The Royalists had come back 
from France deeply convinced of the superiority of 
Paris in all matters belonging to the business of the 
stage. Immediately upon the Restoration, in 1661, an 
unknown hand had printed an English version of the 
7l/^;^/^^r of Corneille. Lower had translated the trage- 
dies of that poet ten years before, and had returned 
from his exile in Holland with the dramas of Quinault 
in his hand. But the great rush of Royalists back to 
England had happened just too soon to give them an 
opportunity of witnessing the advent of Moliere. By 
the end of 1659 the exiled Court, hovering on the Dutch 



Sir George Etheredge 267 

frontier, had transferred their attention from Paris to 
London. A few months before this, Moliere and his 
troop had entered Paris, and an unobtrusive perform- 
ance of LEtourdi had gradually led to other triumphs 
and to the creation of the greatest modern school of 
comedy. What gave The Coinical Revenge of Etheredge 
its peculiar value and novelty was that it had been 
written by a man who had seen and understood 
VJ^tourdzy Le Depit Amour eux^ and Les Precieuses 
Ridicules. Etheredge loitered long enough in Paris 
for Moliere to be revealed to him, and then he hastened 
back to England with a totally new idea of what comedy 
ought to be. 

The real hero of the first three comedies of Moliere 
is Mascarille, and in like manner the farcical interest 
of The Comical Revenge centres around a valet, Dufoy. 
When the curtain went up on the first scene, the 
audience felt that a new thing was being presented to 
them, new types and an unfamiliar method. Hitherto 
Ben Jonson had been the one example and theoretical 
master of all popular comedy. The great aim had been 
to hold some extravagance of character up to ridicule, 
to torture one monstrous ineptitude a thousand ways, 
to exhaust the capabilities of the language in fantastic 
quips and humours. The comedian had been bound to 
be in some sort a moralist, to lash himself into an ethical 
rage about something, and to work by a process of 
evolution rather than by passionless observation of 
external manners. Under such a system wit might 
flourish, but there was no room for humour, in the 
modern acceptation of the word; for humour takes 



268 Seventeenth Century Studies 

things quietly, watches unobtrusively, and is at heart 
sublimely indifferent. Now, the Royahsts had come 
home from exile weary of all moral discussion, apt to 
let life slip, longing above all things for rest and 
pleasure and a quiet hour. It was a happy instinct that 
led Etheredge to improve a little on Moliere himself, 
and simply hold up the mirror of his play to the genial, 
sensual life of the young gentlemen his contemporaries. 
The new-found motto of French comedy, castigat 
ridendo 7noreSy would have lain too heavily on English 
shoulders; the time of castigation was over, and life 
flowed merrily down to the deluge of the Revolution. 

The master of Dufoy, Sir Frederick Frollick, is not a 
type, but a portrait ; and each lazy, periwigged fop in 
the pit clapped hands to welcome a friend that seemed 
to have just strolled in from the Mulberry Garden. He 
is a man of quality, who can fight at need with spirit 
and firmness of nerve, but whose customary occupation 
is the pursuit of pleasure without dignity and without 
reflection. Like all Etheredge's fine gentlemen, he is 
a finished fop, although he has the affectation of not 
caring for the society of fine friends. He spends 
hours at his toilet, and '^ there never was a girl more 
humoursome nor tedious in the dressing of her baby." 
It seems to me certain that Etheredge intended Sir 
Frederick as a portrait of himself. Dufoy gives an 
amusing account of his being taken into Sir Frederick's 
service. He was lounging on the new bridge in Paris, 
watching the marionettes and eating custard, when 
young M. de Grandville drove by in his chariot, in 
company with his friend Sir Fred. Frollick, and recom- 



Sir George Etheredge 269 

mended Dufoy as a likely fellow to be entrusted with a 
certain delicate business, which he carried out so well, 
that Sir Frederick made him his valet. The Comical 
Revenge is a series of brisk and entertaining scenes 
strung on a very light thread of plot. Sir Frederick 
plays fast and loose, all through, with a rich widow who 
wants to marry him; a person called Wheedle, with 
an accomplice, Palmer, who dresses up to personate a 
Buckinghamshire drover, plays off the confidence-trick 
on a stupid knight. Sir Nicholas Cully, quite in the 
approved manner of to-day. This pastime, called 
*' coney-catching" a century earlier, was by this time 
revived under the title of " bubbling." By a pleasant 
amenity of the printer^s the rogues say to one another, 
^' Expect your Kew," meaning '^ cue." 

Meanwhile high love affairs, jealousies, and a tremen- 
dous duel, interrupted by the treachery of Puritan 
villains, have occupied the heroic scenes. The comedy 
grows fast and furious ; Sir Nicholas rides to visit the 
widow on a tavern-boy's back, with three bottles of 
wine suspended on a cord behind him. Sir Frederick 
frightens the widow by pretending to be dead, and 
Dufoy, for being troublesome and spiteful, is confined 
by his fellow-servants in a tub, with his head and 
hands stuck out of holes, and stumbles up and down 
the stage in that disguise. A brief extract will give a 
notion of the sprightly and picturesque manner of the 
dialogue. A lady has sent her maid to Sir Frederick's 
lodgings to remonstrate with him on his boisterousness. 

" Beaufort. Jenny in tears ! what's the occasion, poor girl ? 
Maid, I'll tell you, my Lord. 



270 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Sir Fred. Buzz ! Set not her tongue a-going again ; she has 
made more noise than half a dozen paper-mills ; London Bridge 
at low water is silence to her ; in a word, rambling last night, 
we knocked at her mistress's lodging, they denied us entrance, 
whereat a harsh word or two flew out. 

Maid, These were not all your heroic actions ? pray tell the 
consequences, how you marched bravely at the rear of an army 
of linkboys ; upon the sudden, how you gave defiance, and 
then, having waged a bloody war with the constable, and having 
vanquished that dreadful enemy, how you committed a general 
massacre on the glass windows. Are not these most honour- 
able achievements, such as will be registered to your eternal 
fame by the most learned historian of Hicks's Hall? 

Sir Fred, Good, sweet Jenny, let's come to a treaty ; do but 
hear what articles I propose." 

The success of The Comical Revenge was unpre- 
cedented, and it secured its author an instant popu- 
larity. While it was under rehearsal, it attracted the 
attention of the young Lord Buckhurst, then distin- 
guished only as a parliamentary man of promise, but 
soon to become famous as the poet Earl of Dorset. 
To him Etheredge dedicated his play, and by him was 
introduced to that circle of wits, Buckingham, Sedley, 
and the precocious Rochester, with whom he was to be 
associated for the rest of his life. 

Four years later he produced another and a better 
play. Meanwhile English comedy had made great ad- 
vances. Dryden and Wilson had proceeded ; Sedley, 
Shadwell, the Howards, had made their first appear- 
ance ; but none of these, not even the author of The 
Mulberry Garden^ had quite understood the nature of 
Etheredge^s innovation. In She Would if She Could 
he showed them more plainly what he meant, for he 



Sir George Etheredge 271 

had himself come under the influence of a masterpiece 
of comedy. It is certain to me that the movement of 
She Would if She Could is founded upon a reminis- 
cence of Tartuffe^ which, however, was not printed 
until 1669, '*une comedie dont on a fait beaucoup de 
bruit, qui a este longtemps persecutee.'' Etheredge 
may have been present at the original performance of 
the first three acts, at Versailles, in May 1664; but 
it seems to me more probable that he saw the public 
representation at Paris in the summer of 1667, and 
that he hastened back to England with the plot of his 
own piece taking form in his brain. 

The only direct similarity between the French and 
English plays is this, that Lady Cockwood is a female 
Tartuffe, a woman of loud religious pretensions, who 
demands respect and devotion for her piety, and who 
is really engaged, all the time, in the vain prosecution 
of a disgraceful intrigue. Sir Oliver Cockwood, a 
boisterous, elderly knight, has come up to town for 
the season, in company with his pious lady, who leads 
him a sad life, with an old friend. Sir Jocelyn Jolly, 
and with the wards of the latter, two spirited girls 
called Ariana and Gatty. These people have taken 
lodgings in St. James's Street, at the Black Posts, as 
Mrs. Sentry, the maid, takes pains to inform young 
Mr. Courtall, a gentleman of fashion in whom Lady 
Cockwood takes an interest less ingenuous than she 
pretends. The scene, therefore, instead of being laid 
in Arcadia or Cockayne, sets us down in the heart of 
the West End, the fashionable quarter of the London 
of 1668. The reader who has not studied old maps. 



272 Seventeenth Century Studies 

or the agreeable books of Mr. Wheatley, is likely to 
be extremely ill informed as to the limits and scope of 
the town two hundred years ago. St. James's Street, 
which contained all the most genteel houses, ran, a 
sort of rural road, from Portugal Street, or Piccadilly, 
down to St. James's Park. One of Charles II.'s first 
acts was to beautify this district. St. James's Park, 
which then included Green Park, had been a kind of 
open meadow. The King cut a canal through it, 
planted it with lime-trees, and turned the path that 
led through St. James's Fields into a drive called Pall 
Mall. In St. James's Street rank and fashion clustered, 
and young poets contended for the honour of an invi- 
tation to Mr. Waller's house on the west side. Here 
also the country gentry lodged when they came up to 
town, and a few smart shops had recently been opened 
to supply the needs of people of quality. 

Such was the bright scene of that comedy of fashion- 
able life of which She Would if She Could gives us 
a faithful picture. In a town still untainted by smoke 
and dirt, with fresh country airs blowing over it from 
all quarters but the east, the gay world of Charles II.'s 
court ran through its bright ephemeral existence. 
There is no drama in which the physical surroundings 
of this life are so picturesquely brought before us as 
that of Etheredge. The play at present under dis- 
cussion distinguishes itself from the comic work of 
Dryden, or Wycherley, or Shadwell, even from that 
of Congreve, by the little graphic touches, the intimate 
impression, the clear, bright colour of the scenes. The 
two girls, Sir Jocelyn's wards, finding life dreary with 



Sir George Etheredge 273 

Lady Cockwood and her pieties, put on vizards, and 
range the Parks and the Mall without a chaperon. 
This is an artful contrivance, often afterwards imitated 
— as notably by Lord Lansdowne in his She Gallants 
— but original to Etheredge, and very happy, from the 
opportunity it gives of drawing out naive remarks on 
familiar things; for in the second act the girls find 
their way to the Mulberry Garden, a public place of 
entertainment, adjoining Lord Ariington^s mansion of 
Goring House, afterwards Buckingham Palace, and 
much frequented by a public whom CromwelFs sense 
of propriety had deprived of their favourite Spring 
Garden. Here Ariana and Gatty meet Lady Cock- 
wood's recalcitrant spark Courtall, walking with his 
friend Freeman, and from behind their masks carry 
on with them a hazardous flirtation. The end of this 
scene, when the two sprightly girls break from their 
gallants and appear and reappear, crossing the stage 
from opposite corners, amid scenery that reminded 
every one in the theatre of the haunt most loved by 
Londoners, must have been particularly delightful and 
diverting to witness ; and all these are circumstances 
which we must bear in mind if we wish the drama of 
the Restoration to be a living thing to us in reading 
it. It was a mundane entertainment, but in its earthly 
sincerity it superseded something that had ceased to 
be either human or divine. 

The two old knights are '' harp and violin — nature 
has tuned them to play the fool in concert,*' and their 
extravagances hurry the plot to its crisis. They 
swagger to their own confusion, and Lady Cockwood 



274 Seventeenth Century Studies 

encourages their folly, that she herself may have an 
opportunity of meeting Courtall. She contrives to 
give him an appointment in the New Exchange, which 
seems to have been a sort of arcade leading out of the 
Strand, with shops on each side. When the curtain 
rises for the third act, Mrs. Trinkett is sitting in the 
door of her shop inviting the people of quality to step 
in : " What d'ye buy ? What d'ye lack, gentlemen ? 
Gloves, ribbands, and essences ? ribbands, gloves, and 
essences ? " She is a woman of tact, who, under the 
pretence of selling ''a few fashionable toys to keep the 
ladies in countenance at a play or in the park,'' passes 
letters or makes up rendezvous between people of 
quality. At her shop the gallants '* scent their eye- 
brows and periwigs with a little essence of oranges or 
jessamine ; " and so Courtall occupies himself till Lady 
Cockwood arrives. Fortunately for him, Ariana and 
Gatty, who are out shopping, arrive at the same 
moment ; so he proposes to take them all in his coach 
to the Bear in Drury Lane for a dance. The party at 
the Bear is like a scene from some artistically-mounted 
drama of our own day. Etheredge, with his singular 
eye for colour, crowds the stage with damsels in sky- 
blue, and pink, and flame-coloured taffetas. To them 
arrive Sir Oliver and Sir Jocelyn ; but as Sir Oliver 
was drunk overnight, Lady Cockwood has locked up 
all his clothes except his russet suit of humiliation, in 
which he is an object of ridicule and persecution to all 
the bright crowd, who 

" Wave the gay wreathe, and titter as they prance." 



Sir George Etheredge 275 

In this scene Etheredge introduces a sword, a velvet 
coat, a flageolet, a pair of bands, with touches that 
remind one of Metzu or Gheraerdt Douw. Sir Oliver, 
who is the direct prototype of Vanbrugh's Sir John 
Brute, gets very drunk, dances with his own wife in 
her vizard, and finally brings confusion upon the whole 
company. The ladies rush home, whither Freeman 
comes to console Lady Cockwood ; a noise is heard, 
and he is promptly concealed in a cupboard. Courtall 
enters, and then a fresh hubbub is heard, for Sir Oliver 
has returned. Courtall is hurried under a table just in 
time for the old knight to come in and perceive nothing. 
But he has brought a beautiful China orange home to 
appease his wife, and as he shows this to her it drops 
from his fingers, and runs under the table where 
Courtall lies. The maid, a girl of resource, promptly 
runs away with the candle, and, in the stage dark- 
ness, Courtall is hurried into the cupboard, where he 
finds Freeman. The threads are gradually unravelled ; 
Courtall and Freeman are rewarded, for nothing in 
particular, by the hands of Ariana and Gatty, and Lady 
Cockwood promises to go back to the country and 
behave properly ever after. The plot of so slight a 
thing is a gossamer fabric, and scarcely bears analysis ; 
but the comedy was by far the most sprightly per- 
formance at that time presented to any audience in 
Europe save that which was listening to Moliere. 

Etheredge had not dedicated She Would if She 
Could to any patron ; but the grateful town accepted 
it with enthusiasm, and its author was the most 
popular of the hour. It was confidently hoped that he 



276 Seventeenth Century Studies 

would give his energies to the stage ; but an indolence 
that was habitual to him, and against which he never 
struggled, kept him silent for eight years. During 
this time, however, he preserved his connection with 
the theatres, encouraged Medbourne the actor to trans- 
late Tartuffe^ and wrote an epilogue for him when 
that play was produced in England in 1670. He 
wrote, besides, a great number of little amatory pieces, 
chiefly in octosyllabics, which have never been col- 
lected. Oldys says, in one of his manuscript notes, 
that he once saw a Miscellany^ printed in 1672, 
almost full of verses by Etheredge, but without his 
name. I have not been able to trace this ; but most 
of the numerous collections of contemporary verse 
contained something of his, down to the Miscellany 
of 1 701. If any one took the trouble to extract 
these, at least fifty or sixty poems could be put 
together; but they are none of them very good. 
Etheredge had but little of the lyrical gift of such 
contemporaries as Dryden, Rochester, and Sedley; 
his rhymed verse is apt to be awkward and languid. 
This may be as good an opportunity as any other of 
quoting the best song of his that I have been able 
to unearth : — 

" Ye happy swains, whose hearts are free 

From love's imperial chain, 
Take warning and be taught by me 

To avoid th' enchanting pain ; 
Fatal the wolves to trembling flocks, 

Fierce winds to blossoms prove, 
To careless seamen, hidden rocks, 

To human quiet — love. 



Sir George Etheredge 277 

" Fly the fair sex, if bliss you prize — 

The snake's beneath the flower ; 
Who ever gazed on beauteous eyes 

And tasted quiet more ? 
How faithless is the lovers' joy ! 

How constant is their care ! 
The kind with falsehood do destroy, 

The cruel with despair." 

We learn from Shadwell, in the preface to The 
Hu7norists of 1671, that the success of She Would if 
She Could was endangered by the slovenly playing of 
the actors. This may have helped to disgust the 
fastidious Etheredge. At all events, the satirists 
began to be busy with the name of so inert a popular 
playwright; and, in 1675, Rochester expressed a 
general opinion in the doggerel of his Session of the 
Poets : — 

" Now Apollo had got gentle George in his eye. 
And frankly confessed that, of all men that writ. 
There's none had more fancy, sense, judgment, and wit ; 
But i' the crying sin, idleness, he was so hardened 
That his long seven years' silence was not to be pardoned." 

'* Gentle George^' gave way, and composed, with all 
the sparkle, wit, and finish of which he was capable, 
his last and best-known piece. The Man of Mode^ or 
Sir Fopling Flutter^ brought out at the Duke's Theatre 
in the summer of 1676. Recollecting his threatened 
fiasco in 1668, Etheredge determined to put himself 
under powerful patronage, and dedicated his new play 
to Mary of Modena, the young Duchess of York, who 
remained his faithful patroness until fortune bereft 
her of the power to give. Sir Car Scroope wrote the 



278 Seventeenth Century Studies 

prologue, Dryden the epilogue, and the play was acted 
by the best company of the time — Betterton, Harris, 
Medbourne, and the wife of Shadwell, while the part of 
Belinda was in all probability taken by the matchless 
Mrs. Barry, the new glory of the stage. 

The great merit of The Man of Mode rests in the 
brilliance of the writing and the force of the char- 
acterisation. There is no plot. People of the old 
school, like Captain Alexander Radcliffe, who liked 
plot above all other things in a comedy, decried the 
manner of Etheredge, and preferred to it *' the manly 
art of brawny Wycherley,'' the new writer, whose 
Country Wife had just enjoyed so much success ; but, 
on the whole, the public was dazzled and delighted 
with the new types and the brisk dialogue, and united 
to give Sir Fopling Flutter a warmer welcome than 
greeted any other stage-hero during Charles II. 's 
reign. There was a delightful heroine, with abundance 
of light-brown hair, and lips like the petals of '*a 
Provence rose, fresh on the bush, ere the morning sun 
has quite drawn up the dew ; " there was a shoemaker 
whom every one knew, and an orange- woman whom 
everybody might have known — characters which 
Dickens would have laughed at and commended ; 
there was Young Bellair, in which Etheredge drew his 
own portrait; there was the sparkling Dorimant, so 
dressed that all the pit should know that my Lord 
Rochester was intended; there was Medley, Young 
Bellair's bosom friend, in whom the gossips discovered 
the portrait of Sir Charles Sedley; above all, there 
was Sir Fopling Flutter, the monarch of all beaux and 



Sir George Etheredge 279 

dandies, the froth of Parisian affectation — a delightful 
personage, almost as alive to us to-day as to the 
enchanted audience of 1676. During two acts the 
great creature was spoken of, but never seen. Just 
arrived from France, all the world had heard about 
him, and was longing to see him, "with a pair of 
gloves up to his elbows, and his periwig was more 
exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a 
ball." At last, in the third act, when curiosity has 
been raised to a fever, the fop appears. He is intro- 
duced to a group of ladies and gentlemen of quality, 
and when the first civilities are over he begins at once 
to criticise their dress : — 

" Lady Townley, Wit, I perceive, has more power over you 
than beauty, Sir Fopling, else you would not have let this lady 
stand so long neglected. 

Sir Fopling {to Emilia), A thousand pardons, madam ! Some 
civilities due of course upon the meeting a long-absent friend. 
The eclat of so much beauty, I confess, ought to have charmed 
me sooner. 

Emilia, The brilliant of so much good language, sir, has 
much more power than the little beauty I can boast. 

Sir Fop, I never saw anything prettier than this high work, 
on y owe point cTEspagne, 

Emilia. 'Tis not so rich as point de Venise, 

Sir Fop, Not altogether, but looks cooler, and is more proper 
for the season. Dorimant, is not that Medley ? 

Dori, The same, sir. 

Sir Fop, Forgive me, sir, in this emba^'ras of civilities, I 
could not come to have you in my arms sooner. You under- 
stand an equipage the best of any man in town, I hear ! 

Medley, By my own you would not guess it. 

Sir Fop, There are critics who do not write, sir. Have you 
taken notice of the caleche I brought over ? 



2 8o Seventeenth Century Studies 

Medley, O yes ! it has quite another air than the EngHsh 
make. 

Sir Fop, 'Tis as easily known from an EngHsh tumbrel as 
an inns-of-court man is from one of us. 

DorL Truly there is a bel-air in caleches as well as men. 

Medley, But there are few so delicate as to observe it. 

Sir Fop, The world is generally very grossier here indeed. 

Lady Townley, He's very fine {looking at Sir Fop), 

Emilia, Extreme proper. 

Sir Fop, O, a slight suit I had made to appear in at my first 
arrival — not worthy your admiration, ladies. 

Dori. The pantaloon is very well mounted. 

Sir Fop. The tassels are new and pretty. 

Medley, I never saw a coat better cut. 

Sir Fop, It makes me look long-waisted, and, I think, 
slender. 

Lady Townley, His gloves are well-fingered, large and 
g^raceful. 

Sir Fop, I was always eminent for being bien-ganie, 

Emilia. He must wear nothing but what are originals of the 
most famous hands in Paris ! 

Sir Fop. You are in the right, madam. 

Lady Townley. The suit ? 

Sir Fop. Barroy. 

Emilia. The garniture ? 

Sir Fop, Le Gras. 

Medley, The shoes ? 

Sir Fop, Piccat. 

Dori, The periwig ? 

Sir Fop, Chedreux. 

Lady Townley and Emilia {together). The gloves ? 

Sir Fop, Orangerie {holding up his hands to the7n). You 
know the smell, ladies ? " 

The hand that throws in these light touches, in a 
key of rose-colour on pale gray, no longer reminds us 
of Moliere, but exceedingly of Congreve. A recent 
critic has very justly remarked that in mere wit, the 



Sir George Etheredge 281 

continuity of brilliant dialogue in which the action does 
not seek to advance, Moliere is scarcely the equal of 
Congreve at his best, and the brightest scenes of The 
Man of Mode show the original direction taken by 
Etheredge in that line which was more specially to 
mark the triumph of English comedy. But the author 
of Love for Love was still in the nursery when The 
Man of Mode appeared, as it were, to teach him how to 
write. Until Congreve reached manhood, Etheredge^s 
example seemed to have been lost, and the lesson he 
attempted to instil to have fallen on admiring hearers 
that were incapable of repeating it. 

The shallowness, vivacity, and vanity of Sir Fopling 
are admirably maintained. In the scene of which part 
has just been quoted, after showing his intimate know- 
ledge of all the best tradesmen in Paris, some one 
drops the name of Bussy, to see if he is equally at 
home among literary notabilities. But he supposes 
that Bussy d'Ambois is meant, and is convicted of 
having never heard of Bussy Rabutin. This is a curi- 
ously early notice of a famous writer who survived it 
nearly twenty years ; it does not seem that any French 
critic has observed this. Sir Fopling Flutter is so 
eminently the best of Etheredge's creations that we are 
tempted to give one more sample of his quality. He 
has come with two or three other sparks to visit Dori- 
mant at his rooms, and he dances z. pas seuL 

" Young Bellair. See ! Sir Fopling is dancing ! 
Sir Fop. Prithee, Dorimant, why hast thou not a glass hung 
up here ? A room is the dullest thing without one. 
Y, Bell, Here is company to entertain you. 



2 82 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Sir Fop. But I mean in case of being alone. In a glass a 
man may entertain himself, 

Dori. The shadow of himself indeed. 

Sir Fop, Correct the errors of his motion and his dress. 

Medley, I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember 
the saying of the wise man, and study yourself ! 

Sir Fop, 'Tis the best diversion in our retirements. Dori- 
mant, thou art a pretty fellow, and wearest thy clothes well, but 
I never saw thee have a handsome cravat. Were they made 
up like mine, they'd give another air to thy face. Prithee let 
me send my man to dress thee one day. By heavens, an 
Englishman cannot tie a ribband. 

Dori, They are something clumsy-fisted. 

Sir Fop, I have brought over the prettiest fellow that ever 
spread a toilet ; he served some time under Merille, the greatest 
genie in the world for a valet de chambre, 

Dori, What, he who formerly belonged to the Duke of 
Candolle ? 

Sir Fop, The very same — and got him his immortal re- 
putation. 

Dori. You've a very fine brandenburgh on, Sir Fopling ! 

Sir Fop. It serves to wrap me up after the fatigue of a ball. 

Medley. I see you often in it, with your periwig tied up. 

Sir Fop, We should not always be in a set dress ; 'tis more 
e7t cavalier to appear now and then in a deshabille,^'' 

In these wholly fastastical studies of manners we feel 
less than in the more serious portions of the comedy 
that total absence of moral purpose, high aim, or even 
honourable instinct which was the canker of the age. 
A negligence that pervaded every section of the upper 
classes, which robbed statesmen of their patriotism and 
the clergy of their earnestness, was only too exactly 
mirrored in the sprightly follies of the stage. Yet even 
there we are annoyed by a heroine who is discovered 
eating a nectarine, and who, ralHed on buying a 



Sir George Etheredge 283 

^* filthy nosegay/^ indignantly rebuts the accusation, 
and declares that nothing would induce her to smell 
such vulgar flowers as stocks and carnations, or 
anything that blossoms, except orange-flowers and 
tuberose. It is a frivolous world, Strephon bending 
on one knee to Cloe, who fans the pink blush on her 
painted cheek, while Momus peeps, with a grimace, 
through the curtains behind her. They form an 
engaging trio, mais ce n^ est pas de la vie humaine. 

The Man of Mode was licensed on June 3, 1676 ; it 
enjoyed an unparalleled success, and before the month 
was out its author was fleeing for his life. We learn 
this from the Hatton Correspondence^ first printed in 
1879. It seems that in the middle of June, Etheredge, 
Rochester, and two friends. Captain Bridges and Mr. 
Downes, went to Epsom on a Sunday night. They 
were tossing some fiddlers in a blanket for refusing to 
play, when a barber, who came to see what the noise 
was, as a practical joke induced them to knock up the 
constable. They did so with a vengeance, for they 
smashed open his door, entered his house, and broke 
his head, giving him a severe beating. At last they 
-were overpowered by the watch, and Etheredge having 
made a submissive oration, the row seemed to be at an 
end, when suddenly Lord Rochester, like a coward as 
he was, drew his sword on the constable, who had dis- 
missed his men. The constable shrieked out *' Murder ! ^' 
and the watch returning, one of them broke the skull 
of Downes with his staff. The others ran away, and 
the watchmen were left to run poor Downes through 
with a pike. He lingered until the 29th, when Charles 



284 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Hatton records that he is dead, and that Etheredge and 
Rochester have absconded. 

Four years afterwards the Hatton Correspondence 
gives us another glimpse of our poet, again in trouble. 
On January 14, 1680, the roof of the tennis-court in 
the Haymarket fell down. ^*Sir George Etheredge 
and several others were very dangerously hurt. Sir 
Charles Sidley had his skull broke, and it is thought 
it will be mortal.'' Sidley, or Sedley, flourished for 
twenty years more ; but we may note that here, for the 
first time, our dramatist is '* Sir George.^' It is evident 
that he had been knighted since 1676, when he was 
plain '* George Etheredge, Esq." In a manuscript 
poem called The Present State of Matrimony^ he is 
accused of having married a rich widow to facilitate 
his being knighted, and with success. The entries in 
The Letterbook give me reason to believe that he was 
not maligned in this. But he seems to have lived on 
very bad terms with his wife, and to have disgraced 
himself by the open protection of Mrs. Barry, after 
Rochester's death in 1680. By this famous actress, 
whose name can no more be omitted from the history 
of literature than that of Mrs. Gwynn from the 
history of statecraft, he had a daughter, on whom he 
settled five or six thousand pounds, but who died 
young. 

The close of Etheredge's career was spent in the 
diplomatic service. When this commenced is more 
than I have been able to discover. From The Letter- 
book it appears that he was for some time envoy of 
Charles II. at the Hague. It would even seem that he 



Sir George Etheredge 285 

was sent to Constantinople, for a contemporary satirist 
speaks of 

" Ovid to Pontus sent for too much wit, 
Etheredge to Turkey for the want of it." 

Certain expressions in The Letterbook make me 
suspect that he had been in Sweden. But it is not 
until the accession of James II. that his figure comes 
out into real distinctness. In this connection I think 
it would be hard to exaggerate the value of The Letter- 
book^ which I am about to introduce to my readers. 
After reading it from end to end I feel that I know Sir 
George Etheredge, hitherto the most phantasmal of the 
English poets, better than I can know any literary man 
of his time, better than Dryden, better, perhaps, than 
Milton. 

In February 1685, James II. ascended the throne, 
and by March, Mary of Modena had worked so as- 
siduously for her favourite that this warrant, for the 
discovery of which I owe my best thanks to Mr. Noel 
Sainsbury, was entered in the Privy Signet Book : — 

"Warrant to pay Sir Geo. Etheredge (whom his Maj. has 
thought fit to employ in his service in Germany), 3/. per diem." 

On March 5 The Letterbook was bought, and 
Etheredge and his secretary started for the Continent. 
Why they loitered at the Hague and in Amsterdam 
does not appear, but their journey was made in so 
leisurely a manner that they did not arrive in Ratisbon 
until August 30. It does appear, however, that the 
dissipated Httle knight behaved very ill in Holland, 



2 86 Seventeenth Century Studies 

and spent one summer^s night dead drunk in the streets 
of the Hague. On his arrival at Ratisbon, he had two 
letters of recommendation, one from Barillon to the 
French ambassador, the other from the Spanish 
ambassador to the Burgundian minister.* The first 
of these he used at once, and cultivated the society at 
the French Embassy in a v^ay that would have been 
extremely impolitic if it had not, without doubt, been 
entered upon in accordance with instructions from 
home. It was doubtless known to Etheredge, although 
a secret at the German court, that James had com- 
menced his reign by opening private negotiations with 
France. The poet settled in a very nice house, with a 
garden running down to the Danube, set up a carriage 
and good horses, valets, and *' a cook, though I cannot 
hope to be well served by the latter " in this barbarous 
Germany. On December 24 he wrote two letters, 
parts of which may be quoted here. To Lord Sunder- 
land he writes : — 

" Since my coming here I have had a little fever, which has 
been the reason I have not paid my duty so regular as I ought 
to do to your Lordship. I am now pretty well recovered, and 
hope I am quit at a reasonable price for what I was to pay on 
the change of climate, and a greater change in my manner of 
living. Is it not enough to breed an ill habit of body in a man 
who was used to sit up till morning to be forced, for want of know- 
ing what to do with himself, to go to bed in the evening ; one 
who has been used to live with all freedom, never to approach any 

* There was no Burgundy known to history at this date. Mr. 
Samuel R. Gardiner suggests to me that this was an agent of the 
Spanish governor at Brussels, the Spanish Netherlands being part of 
the old circle of Burgundy. 



Sir George Etheredge 287 

one without ceremony ; one who has been used to run up and 
down to find variety of company, to sit at home and entertain 
himself in soHtude? One would think the Diet had made a 
Reichsgutachten to banish all pastimes in the city. Here was 
the Countess of Nostitz, but malice would not let her live in 
quiet, and she is lately removed to Prague. Good company 
met at her house, and she had a little hombre to entertain them. 
A more commode lady, by what I hear, never kept a basset 
[table] in London. If I do well after all this, you must allow 
me to be a great philosopher ; and I dare affirm Cato left not 
the world with more firmness of soul than I did England." 

And to a friend in Paris, on the same date : — 

" Le divertissement le plus galant du pays cet hiver c'est le 
traineau, ou Ton se met en croupe de quelque belle Allemande, 
de maniere que vous ne pouvez ni la voir, ni lui parler, a cause 
d'un diable de tintamarre des sonnettes dont les harnais sont 
tous garnis." 

In short, he very soon learned the limitations of the 
place. His letters are filled with complaints of the 
boorish manners of the people, the dreary etiquette 
which encumbers the Court and the Diet, and the 
solitude he feels in being separated from all his literary 
friends. The malice of the secretary informs us that 
Sir George soon gave up his precise manner of living, 
and adopted a lazier style. He seldom rose until two 
or three p.m., dined at five or six, and then went to 
the French ambassador's for three or four hours. 
Finding time hang heavy on his hands, he took to 
gaming with any disreputable Frenchman that hap- 
pened to pass through the town. Already, early in 
1686, a scoundrel called Purpurat, from Vienna, has 
got round him by flatteries and presents of tobacco. 



288 Seventeenth Century Studies 

and has robbed him of ten thousand crowns at cards. 
When, however, things have come to this pass, 
Etheredge wakes up, and on the suggestion of M. 
Purpurat that he will be going back to Vienna, detains 
him until he has won nearly all his money back again, 
and finally is quit with the loss of a pair of pistols, 
with his crest upon them, which Purpurat shows in 
proof of his ascendency over the English ambassador. 

These matters occupy the spring and summer of 
1686, but there is nothing said about them in the 
letters home. These letters, however, are cheerful 
enough. In January he encloses, with his despatches 
to the Earl of Middleton, a long squib in octosyllabic 
verse, which the English minister, who is ill at these 
numbers, gets Dryden to answer in kind. A cancelled 
couplet in the first draft of the former remarks : — 

" Let them who live in plenty flout ; 
I must make shift with sauer kraut." 

In June 1686 he writes to Middleton that he has 
*^not this week received any letter from England, 
which is a thing that touches me here as nearly as 
ever a disappointment did in London with the woman 
I loved most tenderly.*' Middleton comforts him by 
telling him that the king, after a performance of 
The Man of Mode ^ remarked to him that he expected 
Etheredge to put on the sock, and write a new comedy 
while he was at Ratisbon. Once or twice, in subse- 
quent letters, the poet refers to this idea ; but the 
weight of affairs, combined with his native indolence, 
prevented his attempting the task. Meanwhile, he does 



Sir George Etheredge 289 

not seem to have neglected his duty as it was understood 
in those days. He writes, so he says at least, twice 
every week about state matters to Middleton, and, not- 
withstanding all the spiteful messages sent home about 
him, he does not seem to have ever lost the confidence 
of James and his ministers. These latter were most 
of them his private friends, and in his most official 
communications he suddenly diverges into some wag- 
gish allusion to old times. His attitude at Ratisbon 
was not what we should now demand from an envoy. 
The English people, the English Parliament, do not 
exist for him ; his one standard of duty is the per- 
sonal wish of the king. By indulging the bias of 
James, which indeed was his own bias, an excessive 
partiality for all things French, he won himself, as we 
shall see, the extreme ill-will of the Germans. But 
the only really serious scrape into which he got, an 
affair which annoyed him throughout the autumn and 
winter of 1686, does not particularly redound to his 
discredit. 

It is a curious story, and characteristic of the times ; 
The Letterbook, by giving Etheredge's own account, and 
also the secretary's spiteful rendering, enables us to 
follow the circumstances pretty closely. A troop of 
actors from Nuremberg came over to Ratisbon in the 
summer of 1686, with a star who seems to have been 
the leading actress of her time in South Germany. 
This lady, about whom the only biographical fact that 
we discover is that her Christian name was Julia, seems 
to have been respectability itself. Even the enemies of 
Etheredge did not suggest that any immoral connection 



290 Seventeenth Century Studies 

existed between them, and on the last day of the year, 
after having suffered all sorts of annoyance on her 
behalf, he still complains that she is 2js>fiere as she is fair. 
But actors were then still looked upon in Germany, as to 
some extent even in France, as social pariahs, vagabonds 
whom it was disgraceful to know, except as servants 
of a high order; artistic menials, whose vocation it 
was to amuse the great. But England was already 
more civilised than this ; Etheredge was used to meet 
Betterton and his stately wife at the court of his monarch, 
and even the sullied reputation of such lovely sinners 
as Mrs. Barry did not shut them out of Whitehall. 
Etheredge, therefore, charmed in his Abdera of letters 
by the art and wit and beauty of Julia, paid her a state 
visit in his coach, and prayed for the honour of a visit 
in return. Ratisbon was beside itself with indigna- 
tion. Every sort of social insult was heaped upon 
the English envoy. At a fete champetre the lubberly 
Germans crowded out their elbows so as to leave him 
no place at table; the grand ladies cut him in the 
street when their coaches met his, and it was made 
a subject of venomous report to England that, in spite 
of public opinion, he refused to quit the acquaintance of 
the comediennej as they scornfully named her. 

At last, on the evening of November 25, a group of 
students and young people of quality, who had heard 
that Julia was dining with the English ambassador to 
meet the French envoy and one or two guests, sur- 
rounded Etheredge's house in masks, threw stones at 
the windows, shouted '* Great is Diana of the English 
envoy ! " and, on Etheredge ^s appearing, roared to him 



Sir George Etheredge 291 

to throw out to them the comedienne. The plucky 
httle poet answered by arming his lacqueys and his 
maids with sword-sticks, pokers, and whatever came 
to hand, and by suddenly charging the crowd at the 
head of his little garrison. The Germans were routed 
for a moment, and Etheredge took advantage of his 
success to put Julia into his coach, jump in beside 
her, and conduct her to her lodging. The crowd, 
however, was too powerful for him ; and though she 
slept that night in safety, next day she was thrown 
into prison by the magistrates, for causing a disturb- 
ance in the streets. 

Etheredge, not knowing what to do, wrote this 
epistle to the ringleader of the attack on his house, 
the Baron Von Sensheim : — 

" J'estois surpris d'apprendre que ce joly gentil-homme 
travesty en Italian hier au soir estoit le Baron de Senheim. Je 
ne savois pas que les honnetes gens se meloient avec des 
lacquais ramassez pour faire les fanfarons, et les batteurs de 
pavez. Si vous avez quelque chose a me dire, faites le moy 
savoir comme vous devez, et ne vous amusez plus a venir 
insulter mes Domestiques ni ma maison, soyez content que 
vous I'avez echappe belle et ne retournez plus chercher les 
rdcompences de telles follies pour vos beaux compagnons. 
J'ay des autres mesures k prendre avec eux." 

To this he received a vague and impertinent reply 
in German. Opinion in the town was so strongly 
moved, that for some time Etheredge never went out 
without having a musketoon in his coach, and each 
of his footmen armed with a brace of pistols ready 
charged. Eventually the lady was released, on the 
understanding that she and her company should leave 



292 Seventeenth Century Studies 

the town, which they did, proceeding in the last days 
of 1686 across the Danube to Bayrischenhoff,* where 
Etheredge visited them. It was in the midst of this 
turmoil that Etheredge composed some of his best 
occasional verses. I do not think they have ever been 
printed before : — 

" Upon the downs when shall I breathe at ease, 
Have nothing else to do but what I please, 
In a fresh cooling shade upon the brink 
Of Arden's spring, have time to read and think, 
A^d stretch, and sleep, when all my care shall be 
For health, and pleasure my philosophy ? 
When shall I rest from business, noise, and strife. 
Lay down the soldier's and the courtier's life, 
And in a little melancholy seat 
Begin at last to live and to forget 
The nonsense and the farce of what the fools call great." 

There is something strangely Augustan about this 
fragment; we should expect it to be dated 1716 rather 
than 1686, and to be signed by some Pomfret or Tickell 
of the school of Addison. 

On New- Year's Day, 1687, Etheredge encloses in a 
letter to the Earl of Middleton a French song, inspired 
by Julia, which may deserve to be printed as a 
curiosity. I give it in the author's spelling, which 
shone more in French than English : — 

" Garde le secret de ton ame, 
Et ne te laisse pas flatter, 
Qu'Iris espargnera ta flamme. 
Si tu luy permets d^clater ; 

* That is to say, I suppose, the modern Stadt-am-Hof. 



Sir George Etheredge 293 

Son Humeur, a I'amour rebelle, 

Exile tous ses doux desirs, 
Et la tendresse est criminelle 

Qui veut luy parler en soupirs. 

" Puis que tu vis sous son empire, 

II faut luy cacher ton destin, 
Si tu ne veux le rendre pire 

Perce du trait de son d^dain ; 
D'une rigeur si delicate 

Ton coeur ne pent rien esperer, 
Derobe done a cette ingrate 

La vanite d'en trionfer." 

In February a change of ministry in London gives 
him something else to think about ; he hears a report 
that he is to be sent to Stockholm ; he writes eagerly 
to his patrons for news. On the eleventh of the month 
he receives a tremendous snub from the Treasury 
about his extravagance, and is told that in future his 
extra expenses must never exceed fifty pounds every 
three months. He is, indeed, assailed with many 
annoyances, for his wife writes on the subject of the 
comedienne from Nuremberg, and roundly calls him a 
rogue. Upon this Etheredge writes to the poet, Lord 
Mulgrave, and begs him to make up the quarrel, send- 
ing by the same post, on March 13, 1687, this judicious 
letter to Lady Etheredge : — 

"My Lady, — I beg your pardon for undertaking to advise 
you. I am so well satisfied by your last letter of your prudence 
and judgment that I shall never more commit the same error. 
I wish there were copies of it in London that it might serve 
as a pattern to modest wives to write to their husbands ; you 
shall find me so careful hereafter how I offend you that I 
will no more subscribe myself your loving, since you take it 
ill, but,— Madam, Y^ most dutyfull husband, G. E." 



294 Seventeenth Century Studies 

His letters of 1687 are very full of personal items 
and scraps of literary gossip. It would be impossible 
on this, the first introduction of The Letterbook^ to 
do justice to all its wealth of allusion. He carefully 
repeats the harangue of the Siamese ambassadors on 
leaving the German court; he complains again and 
again of the neglect of the Count of Windisgratz, who 
represents the Prince of Nassau, and is all-powerful 
in the Palatinate ; he complains still more bitterly of 
the open rudeness of the Countess Windisgratz; he 
is anxious about the welfare of Nat Lee, at that time 
shut up in a lunatic asylum, but about to emerge for 
the production of The Princess of Cleve^ in 1689, ^^^^ 
then to die ; he writes a delightful letter to Betterton, 
on May 26, 1687, asking for news of all kinds about 
the stage. He says that his chief diversion is music, 
that he has three musicians living in the house, that 
they play all the best operas, and that a friend in Paris 
sends him whatever good music is published. One 
wonders whether Etheredge knew that Jean Baptiste 
LuUy had died a week or two before this letter was 
written. News of the success of Sedley's Bellamira 
reaches him in June 1687, and provokes from him 
this eloquent defence of his old friend^s genius : — 

" I am glad the town has so good a taste as to give the same 
just applause to S''. Charles Sidley's writing which his friends 
have always done to his conversation. Few of our plays can 
boast of more wit than I have heard him speak at a supper. 
Some barren sparks have found fault with what he has formerly 
done, only because the fairness of the soil has produced so big 
a crop. I daily drink his health, my Lord Dorset's, your own, 
and all our friends'." 



Sir George Etheredge 295 

A few allusions to famous men of letters, all made in 
1687, may be placed side by side : — 

" Mr. Wynne has sent me The Hind and the Panther^ by 
which I find John Dryden has a noble ambition to restore 
poetry to its ancient dignity in wrapping up the mysteries of 
religion in verse. What a shame it is to me to see him a 
saint, and remain still the same devil [myself]. 

" Dryden finds his Macflecknoe does no good : I wish him 
better success with his Hind and Panther, 

" General Dryden is an expert captain, but I always thought 
him fitter for execution than council. 

"Remind my Lord Dorset how he and I carried two 
draggled-tailed nymphs one bitter frosty night over the Thames 
to Lambeth. 

" If he happens in a house with Mr. Crown, John's songs will 
charm the whole family." 

A letter from Dryden, full of pleasant chat, informs 
Etheredge in February that Wycherley is sick of an 
apoplexy. The envoy begs leave, later in the year, to 
visit his friend, the Count de Thun, whose acquaintance 
he made in Amsterdam, and who is now at Munich, but 
permission is refused. In October the whole Electoral 
College invites itself to spend the afternoon in Sir 
George Etheredge^s garden, and he entertains them so 
lavishly, and with so little infusion of Danube water in 
the wine, that next morning he is ill in bed. His in- 
disposition turns to tertian ague, and towards the end 
of the month he asks to be informed how quinine should 
be prepared. He compares himself philosophically to 
Falstaff, however, and by Christmas time grows pensive 
at the thought of the ^^plum-pottage" at home, and is 
solicitous about a black laced hood and pair of scarlet 



296 Seventeenth Century Studies 

stockings which he has ordered from London. In 
January 1688 he laments that Sedley has grown 
temperate and Dorset uxorious, but vows that he will 
be on his guard, and remain foppish. The last extract 
that has any literary interest is taken from a letter 
dated March 8, 1688:— , 

" Mrs. Barry bears up as well as I myself have done ; my 
poor Lord Rochester [Wilmot, not Hyde] could not weather 
the Cape, and live under the line fatal to puling constitutions. 
Though I have given up writing plays, I should be glad to read 
a good one, wherefore pray let Will Richards send me Mr. 
Shad well's [The Squire of Alsatid\ as soon as it is printed, 
that I may know what is being done. . . . Nature, you know, 
intended me for an idle fellow, and gave me passions and 
qualities fit for that blessed calling, but fortune has made a 
changeling of me, and necessity now forces me to set up for 
a fop of business." 

Three days after this he writes the last letter pre- 
served in The Letterbookj and, but for an appendix to 
that volume, we might have believed the popular story 
that Etheredge fell downstairs at Ratisbon and broke 
his neck. But the treacherous secretary continues to 
write in 1689, and gives us fresh particulars. He 
states that his quarrel with Sir George was that he had 
been promised £60 per annum, and could only get £^0 
out of his master. He further declares that to the last 
Etheredge did not know ten words of Dutch (German), 
and had not merely to make use of a French interpreter, 
but had to entrust his private business to one or other 
of his lacqueys; and that moreover he spent a great 
part of his time ''visiting all the alehouses of the town, 
accompanied by his servants, his valet de chambre^ his 



Sir George Etheredge 297 

hoffmaster, and his dancing and fighting master, all 
with their coats turned inside outwards." 

In his anger he lets us know what became of Ether- 
edge at the Revolution, for in a virulent Latin harangue 
at the close of The Letterbook he states that after a 
stay at Ratisbon of " tres annos et sex menses,'' 
accurately measured, for the secretary's cry is a cry 
for gold, Etheredge fled to Paris. This flight must 
therefore have taken place early in March 1689. 
'' Quando hinc abijt ad asylum apud Gallos quaerendum," 
the poet left his books behind him, a proof that his 
taking leave was sudden and urgent. The secretary 
gives a list of them, and it is interesting to find the only 
play-books mentioned are Shakespeare's Works and 
the CEuvres de Holier e^ in two vols., probably the 
edition of 1682. I note also the works of Sarrazin 
and of Voiture. 

At this point, I am sorry to say, the figure of 
Etheredge at present eludes me. There seems no clue 
whatever to the date of his death, except that in an 
anonymous pamphlet, written by John Dennis, and 
printed in 1722, Etheredge is spoken of as having been 
dead '* nearly thirty years." Dennis was over thirty 
at the Revolution, and is as trustworthy an authority 
as we could wish for. By this it would seem that 
Etheredge died about 1693, nearer the age of sixty than 
fifty. But Colonel Chester found the record of ad- 
ministration to the estate of a Dame Mary Etheredge, 
widow, dated Feb. i, 1692. As we know of no other 
knight of the name, except Sir James Etheredge, who 
died in 1736, this was probably the poet's relict; and it 



298 Seventeenth Century Studies 

may yet appear that he died in 1691. He was a short, 
brisk man, with a quantity of fair hair, and a fine com- 
plexion, which he spoiled by drinking. He left no 
children, but his brother, who long survived him, left 
a daughter, who is said to have married Aaron Hill. 

[It is to the kindness of my friend Mr. Edward Scott that I owe the 
discovery of The Letterbook, I have also to acknowledge valuable help 
from Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, who has examined the State Papers for 
me. The late Colonel Joseph Chester courteously consented to search 
his invaluable catalogues of the registers. I have acknowledged in the 
body of the chapter my debt to Oldys' manuscript notes and conjec- 
tures. To protect myself from the charge of plagiarism, I may add 
that the anonymous article on Etheredge in the new edition of the 
Encyclopcedia Brttannica, in which the critical view I have here taken 
was first propounded in outline, is from my pen. In all cases my dates 
are new style.] 



THOMAS OTWAY 

WE gaze at the range of wooded hills that rises 
between us and the sky, and we think we 
perceive clearly enough of what the blue-grey 
wall consists. It appears to be a single mass, diversi- 
fied no doubt by upland and hollow, but in its general 
character solid and complete. Yet we approach nearer 
and nearer, we scale a line of hills, we descend into a 
valley, and still the old loftier range is before us. We 
begin to understand that what seemed a solitary barrier 
was in fact only a series of independent ranges, each 
distinct in itself, but all melted together in the har- 
monious perspective. So it is in literature. But even 
as the apparent extent of a mountain range, though 
not strictly accurate, is yet a good general type of 
the tendency of incline in the particular district, so 
the wide groups that form themselves in the history 
of letters, though curiously inexact to the minute 
observer, are yet excellent landmarks in the large 
field of study. 

In reviewing the dramatic literature of England we 
are accustomed to speak loosely of the drama of the 
Restoration, as of a school of playwrights flourishing 
from 1660 to 1700, and we attribute certain qualities 

without much distinction to all the plays of this wide 

299 



300 Seventeenth Century Studies 

period. We are not incorrect in this rough classifica- 
tion ; there are certain obvious features which all the 
dramatists who survived the first date and were born 
within the second unite in displaying. A Gallican vein 
runs through tragedy and comedy, just as surely as an 
Italian vein ran through the Elizabethan drama. 

From Davenant to Gibber the aims are the same, 
the ideal the same, the poetic sentiment the same. But 
when we look a little closer, we are ready to forget that 
this general coincidence exists. When the drama was 
pubhcly reinstituted under Charles II. it was a pompous 
and gorgeous thing, with a new panoply of theatrical 
display. Under the auspices of Davenant, a set of 
fashionables wrote stilted pieces of parade which hardly 
belonged to literature at all. The two families of the 
Killigrews and the Howards were the main supporters 
of this rustling, silken school, and the year 1665 was 
the approximate date of its decay. Dryden sprang, a 
somewhat tawdry Phoenix, from its ashes, and, in 
company with Etheredge, Wilson, and Shadwell, re- 
called the drama to something like good sense. This 
was the first epoch of the Restoration, and for five 
years these four names were the only tolerable ones 
in English drama. 

Between 1670 and 1675 this group received a sudden 
accession of number so remarkable, that it has had no 
parallel since the days of Marlowe. Within four years 
Crowne, Aphra Behn, Wycherley, George, Duke of 
Buckingham, Lacy, Settle, Otway, and Lee published 
each his first play, and in company with these more 
or less distinguished men, a whole army of forgotten 



Thomas Otway 301 

playwrights burst upon the world. After this efflor- 
escence, this aloe-blossoming of bustling talent, twenty 
years passed quietly on without a single new writer, 
except Southerne, who belonged in age to the earlier, 
and by genius to the later, school. Then, again, 
between 1693 ^^^ i/oo^ there ripened simultaneously 
a new crop of dramatists, — Congreve, Gibber, Mary 
Pix, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Rowe. It is plain that 
some designation should distinguish the first group 
from the second. 

I would propose retaining the name of Restoration 
dramatists for the men of the earher period, to entitle 
the contemporaries of Congreve the Orange dramatists : 
thus getting rid of the deceptive impression that the 
excesses and the elegances of these last writers were 
in any way connected with the reign of Charles II., 
who died when most of them were children. It will 
be found that something of the bluff wit of Jonson still 
lingered about the humour of Wycherley and Shadwell; 
there was not a trace of it in the modern and delicate 
sparkle of Congreve; the tragedians, too, even such 
dull dogs as Crowne, retained a tradition of the sudden 
felicities and barbaric ornament of the Elizabethan, 
though in an extremely modified form : a roughness 
which has entirely disappeared from the liquid periods 
of Tamerlane and The Mourning Bride. It may be 
shortly said that the younger school were as easily 
supreme in comedy as the elder in tragedy, since Con- 
greve represents the one and Otway the other. 

Thomas Otway was the son of the Rev. Humphrey 
Otway, rector of Woolbeding, a parish near Midhurst, 



302 Seventeenth Century Studies 

in the western division of Sussex. The poet was born 
at Trotton, on March 3, 1651, in the midst of the Civil 
War, a few months before the decisive battle of 
Worcester. An error in geography has crept into our 
literary history, to the effect that Otway was born on 
the banks of the poetic Arun — 

" But wherefore need I wander wide 
To old Ilissus' distant side, 

Deserted stream, and mute? 
Wild Arun, too, has heard thy strains, 
And Echo, 'midst my native plains, 

Been soothed by Pity's lute. 

" There first the wren thy myrtles shed 
On gentlest Otway's infant head. 

To him thy cell was shown ; 
And while he sang the female heart. 
With youth's soft notes unspoiled by art, 

Thy turtles mixed their own." 

So Collins sang, addressing Pity ; but, unhappily for 
this charming fancy, Trotton is a hamlet on the north 
bank of the Rother, embowered in the billowy woods 
of Woolmer Forest. There remain no traditions of 
the boy's early life. A brief passage in one of his 
poems is all we possess : — 

"My Father was (a thing now rare) 

Loyal and brave : my Mother chaste and fair. 
The pledge of marriage-vows was only I ; 
Alone I lived their much-loved fondled boy ; 
They gave me generous education ; high 
They strove to raise my mind, and with it grew their joy." 

He was sent to school at Winchester, and in 1669 ^^ 
was entered as a commoner of Christ Church College, 



Thomas Otway 303 

Oxford. His early life at the University was so easy 
and brilliant, that in the bitterness of after days it 
seemed in retrospect to have been without a shadow. 
He was loved, courted, and flattered ; his quick parts 
pleased his teachers and attracted to him the dangerous 
society of young wits belonging to a richer station 
than his own. Lord Falkland and the Earl of Ply- 
mouth were among his intimate friends at Oxford ; we 
know their names, while others are forgotten, because 
they remained true to their companion in after life. It 
was probably among these golden youths that Otway 
gained and nourished a taste for pleasure and the 
lighter arts of life. Already he versified, and no 
doubt there were plenty of flatterers ready to promise 
him a career in the newly reawakened literary life of 
London. 

It was probably in the Long Vacation, 1671, being 
twenty years of age, that he managed, we cannot tell 
how, to introduce himself at the Duke's Theatre, in 
Lincoln's Inn Fields. His first literary friend seems 
to have been Aphra Behn, and to her he confided his 
intense desire to appear on the public stage. His face 
and figure, for he was singularly comely, were greatly 
to his advantage, and the heart of the good-natured 
poetess was touched. She gave him a part in her new 
tragi-comedy of The Fordd Marriage, The circum- 
stances were amusing. Betterton, already an actor in 
the prime of life, had to enter as a young lover ; Otway, 
the tender undergraduate, posed as the venerable king. 
Yet the choice of the part showed the kindly tact of the 
shrewd Mrs. Behn. The king had to speak the few 



304 Seventeenth Century Studies 

first words, to which the audience never listens, to make 
some brief rephes in the first scene, and then not to 
speak again until the end of the fourth act. In the fifth 
act he had to make rather a long speech to Betterton, 
explaining that he was '* old and feeble, and could not 
long survive," and this is nearly all he had to say till 
the very end, where he was in great force as the kind 
old man who unites the couples and speaks the last 
words. It was quite a crucial test, and Otway proved 
his entire inability to face the public. He trembled, 
was inaudible, melted in an agony, and had to leave 
the stage. The part was given to Westwood, a pro- 
fessional actor, and Otway never essayed to tread the 
boards again. 

After this blow to his vanity he went back to 
Oxford again, somewhat crestfallen, we cannot doubt. 
But this visit must have produced an immense im- 
pression on his character. To have been spoken to 
on terms of equality by Mr. and Mrs. Betterton, even 
though they may have laughed at him behind his back, 
was a great distinction for the ambitious lad, and to 
have been received by Mrs. Behn, the greatest female 
wit since Orinda, this must indeed have marked an 
epoch. And he had tasted the fierce, delicious wine of 
theatrical life, he had seen the green-room, associated 
with actors, trodden the sacred boards themselves. No 
doubt this early escapade in 1671 (Downe incorrectly 
dates it 1672) set the seal upon his ghttering and 
melancholy career. He himself darkly alludes to the 
death of a friend, whom he calls Senander, as deeply 
moving him about this time ; but all we know, even by 



Thomas Otway 305 

hearsay, is that he finally deserted the University in 
1674, having refused an opening in the Church which 
was offered him if he would take holy orders. He 
obtained instead a cornetcy in a troop of horse, in 
that year, and sold it again before twelve months 
were over. 

It seems that somewhat about this date he visited 
Duke, the poet, at Cambridge, and this in all proba- 
bility originated the rumour that he became a scholar 
of St. John^s College in that University. At all events 
we find him, in 1675, settled in London, without 
collegiate honours, and with no visible care to gain 
a livelihood by any honest means. That the poor lad 
was gulled by flatterers and idle companions is plain 
enough ; it is obvious, also, that at first he must have 
possessed some fortune or received a liberal allowance 
from his father, for he tried to retain his aristocratic 
friends and vie with them in extravagance as long as 
he could. It was natural that he should gravitate to 
his old friends at the Duke^s Theatre, and though they 
remembered his ill-success as an actor, they were ready 
to receive him as a poet. In 1675 each of the theatres 
accepted a tragedy from an unfledged dramatist ; one 
was the Alcibiades of Otway, the other the Nero of Nat 
Lee, a youth of only twenty, but of precocious talent. 

We must pause a few moments to review the con- 
dition of the stage in England since the Restoration. 
During the last years of the Commonwealth, Sir 
William Davenant had managed, by a clever subter- 
fuge, to introduce in London lyrico-dramatic entertain- 
ments, which he called '' operas,^' a new word to the 

u 



3o6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

English public. These were given somewhat under 
the rose, but when Charles II. arrived, Davenant posed 
as the guardian of the drama, and claimed exclusive 
privileges. The King took counsel with Clarendon, 
and it was decided that only two theatres should be 
licensed, one under his own direct patronage and the 
other under that of the Duke of York. The King's 
Theatre was placed under the censorship of Sir 
Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke's was put in Dave- 
nant's hands. In April 1663 the former company took 
up their abode in Drury Lane, and Dryden thereupon 
was regularly attached as dramatist to their house after 
1667, until which time he sometimes wrote for Dave- 
nant also. In 1668 Davenant died, and the house in 
Lincoln's Inn Fields came into the far abler hands of 
Betterton, a young actor of remarkable energy, who 
had studied carefully at the Theatre Frangais with the 
definite prospect of taking the command of the Duke's 
company. It is true that for a short time Dr. Charles 
Davenant, the amiable son of the late poet-laureate, 
nominally undertook the direction, but Betterton was 
the life and soul of the concern. 

This great actor and excellent man was one of the 
brightest characters of his time. In that jarring age 
of quarrelling, debauchery, and disloyalty, the modest 
and serene figure of Betterton appears in the centre of 
the noisy, boisterous crowd, always erect, always un- 
stained. The greatest actor the Enghsh stage saw 
until Garrick, it was the singular art of Betterton to 
give nobility and life to the pompous and shadowy 
figures of mere lath and paper which the poor tragedians 



Thomas Otway 307 

of the day called heroes: a thankless task which he 
fulfilled with such amazing success, that the pit shrieked 
applause at the trembling conscious poet whom the 
genius of the actor had saved from being damned. 
Hence Betterton was alike the darling of the world 
before and behind the foot -lights. In 1670 he 
strengthened his position by marrying Mrs. Sanderson, 
an actress of the company, whom in time he trained 
to play most admirably. Mrs. Betterton was a woman 
worthy of her husband, and under their conjoint 
supervision the Duke's Theatre rivalled the King's in 
success, despite the attractions of Mr. Hart, the 
tragedian, and the lovely Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn. The 
style of acting patronised at Lincoln's Inn Fields was 
pure and severe. It was a saying of Betterton's that 
he, when he was acting a good part, '^preferred an 
attentive silence to any applause," and it is by such 
slight phrases as these, handed down by casual 
auditors, that we learn how to value the sincerity and 
artistic devotion of the man. 

When Otway visited the Duke's Theatre in 1675, 
the company was familiar to him. One girl, known 
in theatrical history as Mrs. Barry, had indeed been 
received in 1674, but her delivery was so harsh and 
her gait so uncouth, that she had been dismissed at 
the end of the season. Her beauty, however, was 
rapidly ripening, and she contrived to fascinate the 
worst roue of the day, the notorious John Wilmot, 
Earl of Rochester. It is probable that Rochester may 
have made himself specially useful to the Duke's com- 
pany in the year 1675. In order to spite Dryden, the 



3o8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

object of his animosity for the moment, the fretful 
young Earl had adopted the rival cause of John 
Crowne, and his exertions with the Queen had induced 
the latter to commission that poet to produce an opera 
for performance at court. Calisto^ or the Chaste 
Nymph was the result of this unholy alliance, and it 
was brought out with great pomp at the palace. The 
daughters of the Duke of York performed the principal 
parts, and in order to give eclat to the affair, Betterton 
was invited to undertake the rehearsals and Mrs. 
Betterton to train the young amateurs. The princesses 
entered with spirit into the thing, Calisto was a great 
success, and Crowne a happy man. This was in 
1675, and it seems likely that the immediate re-engage- 
ment of Mrs. Barry followed as a personal compliment 
to Rochester. It was no common chance by which 
her first appearance was arranged to be in Otway's 
Alcibiades. These two persons, who were to play 
Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier des Greux with a 
difference, began life together and after a strangely 
similar initial failure. 

We may learn much of the under-current of feeling 
from prologues and epilogues, but the prologue of 
Alcibiades is a mere nervous experiment. The poet 
tries to conceal his trepidation by affecting indifference; 
he shows a want of tact and experience in ridiculing 
the labours of his predecessors. But there was noth- 
ing in his own play that could excuse such arrogance. 
Young Nat Lee, with his blood-and-thunder tragedy 
of Nero at the King's, was giving far better promise 
than this. It was the fashion of the hour to write 



Thomas Otway 309 

tragedies in rhyme, and Alcibiades accordingly is in 
tagged couplets. Nothing could be flatter than the 
versification, nothing tamer than the action, nothing 
more conventional than the sentiments of this tiresome 
play. So entirely without salient features is it, that 
one has to hurry down one's impression of it imme- 
diately one closes it, for in five minutes not a waif of it 
remains in the memory. Charles Lamb remarked that 
nobody could say of Mrs. Conrady's countenance that 
it would be better if she had but a nose. No one 
could say ^of Alcibiades that it would be better if it 
had but a plot. Its entire deficiency in every kind of 
quality gives it quite a unique air of complete insi- 
pidity, which no positive fault could increase. If it 
were even indecent, it would lose its typical dulness ; 
on the contrary, its extreme propriety gave much 
offence to the pit. But Betterton, we cannot doubt, 
clothed the poet's lay figure of Alcibiades with majesty, 
and in the small part of Draxilla, the hero's sister, the 
exquisite Mrs. Barry, now carefully trained to her 
business, won the applause of the audience. More 
than this, she won the weak and feverish heart of the 
young poet, who from this time fluttered like a moth 
towards the flame or star of her beauty. 

Mrs. Barry was an ignoble, calculating woman ; no 
generous act, even of frailty, is recorded of her. 
Whether or not, in rivalry with Mrs. Gwynn, she set 
her cap at royalty, she had a well-balanced sense of 
her own value, and smiled at nothing lower than an 
earl. Of the letters addressed to her through the 
remainder of his brief life by Otway, we possess only 



3IO Seventeenth Century Studies 

the few last, written, it is probable by internal evidence, 
in 1682. We learn from these strange letters, which 
throb through and through with passion under the 
rhetorical ornament of fashionable expression, that for 
seven years she kept him in the torture of suspense. 
It is easy to understand why such a woman should 
reject a humble and penniless lover, and at the same 
time why she should have done her best, by little 
courtesies and partial coquettings, to keep by her side 
the poet who wrote the parts best suited to advance 
her fame. It was universally acknowledged that no 
characters became Mrs. Barry so well as those which 
Otway wrote for her, and thus the poor tortured lover 
had the agony of weaving out of his own brain the 
robes that made his mistress lovely to his rivals. The 
alliance between Mrs. Barry and Lord Rochester was 
probably sufficient to keep the poet at a distance at 
first, but as his passion grew and absorbed all other 
thoughts, he dared to lay his heart at her feet. Like 
Propertius, standing in tears in the street, while 
Cynthia takes deep draughts of Falernian with her 
lover, amid peals of laughter, so is the picture we form 
of the unfortunate Otway, incurably infatuated, haunt- 
ing the gay precincts of the Duke^s Theatre. As long 
as life and fortune lasted, he never abandoned the 
company of the Bettertons, and they acted in every 
play he wrote. 

Although Alcibiades had been a partial failure, 
Betterton accepted another tragedy from the young 
author in the following year. Don Carlos is as great 
an advance on its predecessor as it could possibly be. 



Thomas Otway 311 

It is difficult to believe that they were written by the 
same hand. The rhyming tragedies were on their 
last legs, but Don Carlos was a crutch that might have 
supported the failing fashion for years. The supple, 
strong verse, un-English in character, but worthy of 
Corneille or at least of Rotrou, assists instead of 
hampering the dramatic action : the plot is well con- 
sidered, tragical, and moving; the characters, stagey 
though they be, are vigorously designed and sustained. 
I think we should be justified in calling Don Carlos 
the best English tragedy in rhyme ; by one leap the 
young Oxonian sprang ahead of the veteran Dryden, 
who thereupon began to ''weary of his long-loved 
mistress, rhyme.^^ The story is familiar to all readers 
of Schiller; in Otway^s play the intrigue is simpler 
and less realistic, the object being, as always in 
tragedies of this class, to amuse and excite rather than 
to startle and to melt the audience. 

The opening scene of Don Carlos is a fine declama- 
tory piece of stage-business. The King, in full court, 
lavishes affection on the Queen, in order to excite 
jealousy in Don Carlos, and we are plunged at once 
in the middle of things. We soon become familiar 
with the two types which Otway incessantly presents 
to us. The Queen, a soft and simple creature, be- 
wildered in the etiquette of a Spanish court, full of 
tenderness and womanly pity, is the spiritual sister 
of Monimia, Belvidera, and Lavinia. The hero is still 
more exactly the type which Otway drew, I cannot but 
believe, from his own heart. '' An untamed, haughty, 
hot and furious youth,'' Don Carlos is yet full of 



312 Seventeenth Century Studies 

feminine weakness, irresolute, fevered, infatuate, unable 
to give up the woman he loves though she is in the 
hands of another man, yet lacking the force and temerity 
to cut the Gordian knot by violence. Unstable as 
water, it is impossible that he should avoid the tragical 
end that awaits him. Such is Don Carlos, such again 
in the Orphan is Castalio; but the very prototype 
of the character is Jaffier in Venice Preserved. This 
poetic, passionate, childish nature, born to sorrow as 
the sparks fly upward, is as clearly depicted in the 
love letters to Mrs. Barry as in the tragedies. The 
poet dipped his pen in his own heart. 

The modern reader bears with impatience the rhetoric 
of the Restoration. But, if only to justify the statement 
that Don Carlos is the best of the rhymed tragedies, 
I must quote a few lines as an example of the nervous 
English of the piece. Don John, the King's profligate 
brother, for whom Rochester probably sat, is speaking : — 

'' Why should dull Law rule Nature, who first made 
That Law by which herself is now betrayed ? 
Ere Man's corruptions made him wretched, he 
Was born most noble that was born most free ; 
Each of himself was lord, and unconfined 
Obeyed the dictates of his godlike mind. 
Law was an innovation brought in since 
When fools began to love obedience, 
And called their slavery, safety and defence. 
My glorious father got me in his heat, 
When all he did was eminently great, 
When warlike Belgia felt his conquering power 
And the proud Germans called him Emperor. 
Why should it be a stain then on my blood 
Because I came not by the common road, 
But born obscure and so more like a god ? '' 



Thomas Otway 313 

This is not the language of nature, to be sure, but 
it is vigorous, muscular verse, and the form was that 
in which the age most delighted. The contemporaries 
of Otway and Dryden would have scorned us for 
objecting to this artificial diction as much as we 
should ridicule a barbarian for finding fault with a 
pri7na donna for singing instead of speaking. These 
things go by fashion. It is an accepted idea nowadays 
that a tragedy hero must talk as much as possible like 
an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. 
The same idea, fortunately, prevailed in the time of 
Shakespeare. But always in France, and during the 
Restoration in England also, a certain poetic phrase- 
ologj'' was demanded from a tragedian, just as musical 
expression is demanded from an actor at the opera; 
and we must, if we would judge the productions of 
that age, submit them to the standard which their own 
time recognised. It is very interesting, too, to see the 
flesh and blood peeping out under the rouge and tinsel. 
The parting between the Queen and Don Carlos, at 
the end of the third act, despite its staginess, is full 
of passion and fervour. It was played by Betterton 
and Mrs. Mary Lee; Mrs. Barry, for an unexplained 
reason, having no part given her in this drama. The 
wife of Shadwell the poet took the part of the 
Countess of Eboli, and it was perhaps on this occasion 
that Otway became acquainted with the man-mountain 
who so much hated Dryden. 

The Duke of York, it is difficult to conceive why, 
had admired Alcibiades^ and Don Carlos was dedicated 
to him. The play was an immense success, and 



314 Seventeenth Century Studies 

brought in more money than any tragedy of the 
period. The folks at the King^s Theatre became 
jealous, and one legend says that Dryden had the 
characteristic rashness to say spitefully, that he 
*' knew not a line in it he would be author of.'^ 
Otway, with schoolboy sprightliness, replied that he 
knew a comedy — probably the Marriage-ct-la-Mode — 
that had not so much as a quibble in it which he would 
be the author of. We may see the Mephistopheles 
hand of Rochester encouraging the youth to this 
impertinence ; but at all events Otway was the suc- 
cessful poet of the season, and wonderfully flush of 
money. It was the one fortunate hour of his life, 
and even this, we may believe, was spoiled by the 
female Mordecai in the gate. A slight reference to 
the Fallen Angels, in the fourth act of Do7i Carlos^ 
is worth noting. It seems to show consciousness 
of the great epic of the poet who had just passed 
away. 

It is quite impossible to unravel the threads of per- 
sonal animosity which confuse the dramatic history 
of this period. Everybody's hand was against every- 
body else, and no friendship seemed to last beyond 
a year. Almost the only writer who stood aloof from 
the imbroglio was Mrs. Aphra Behn. She kept on 
good terms with every one ; the busiest litterateur 
of the period had no time to defame the characters 
of her contemporaries. Settle had been the first of 
Rochester's puppets, put up to annoy Dryden, and a 
few years later, when the arch troubler was safe under- 
ground, Settle still was sullenly firing blank cartridges 



Thomas Otway 315 

at the Laureate. But dire discord broke out in this 
joyous camp of assailants in the year 1676. Otway was 
then the reigning favourite with Rochester, Crowne 
was snubbed for having been too successful with his 
Co7tquest of Jerusalem^ and Elkanah Settle was quietly 
dropped. But although ^'Doeg" had endured the in- 
sults of Crowne, the upstart Otway was more than his 
spirit could bear. He challenged Otway to a duel, 
and, if we may believe Shadwell, this terrible contest 
actually came off. Unhappily no lampooner and no 
caricaturist of the period seized the heroic moment for 
the laughter of ensuing generations. 

Otway was better engaged in 1677, on the translation 
of a tragedy of Racine and a farce of Moliere, which 
were performed the same night, and published in a 
single quarto. Titus and Berenice was affectionately 
dedicated to Lord Rochester. It is useless to analyse 
a play which owed little to its English garb. The 
versification is flowing and smooth, a little less vigorous, 
perhaps, than that oi Don Carlos, There are only three 
important persons in the play, and Mrs. Barry took the 
unimportant part of Phoenice, Berenice's maid. Mrs. 
Lee was still the leading lady of the company. As an 
example of inanity and careless workmanship, the four 
opening lines of Titus and Berenice are worthy of a 
crown : — 

'' Thou, my Arsaces, art a stranger here \ 
This is tJH Apartment of the charmi^tg Fair^ 
That Berenice, whom Titus so adores, 
The universe is his, and he is hers." 

But I hasten to confess that they are by far the worst 



3i6 Seventeenth Century Studies 

in the whole play. The Cheats of Scapin has not lost 
all its wit in crossing the Channel, and in this Mrs. 
Barry was allowed the best part, Mrs. Lee not appearing 
at all. 

Otway's preface, with its incense burned before 
Rochester, had scarcely issued from the press, when 
he incurred the violent hatred of that dangerous person. 
The physical condition of the Earl of Rochester had 
by this time become deplorable. For some years he 
had scarcely known what it was to be sober, and at the 
age of twenty-nine he was already a worn-out, fretful 
old man. His excellent constitution, which he had 
supported by temperance until the unfortunate affair 
with the Earl of Mulgrave had undermined his self- 
respect, had now almost given way under the attacks 
of a frantic sensuality. Lord Rochester had become a 
plague-spot in English literature and English society. 
He had begun by being an amiable debauchee, but he 
had ended as a petulant and ferocious rake, whose 
wasting hold on life only increased his malevolent 
licence. The nominal cause of the split with Otway 
was the pretty Mrs. Barry. As the Earl became more 
violent and more abominable, the agony that Otway 
felt in seeing her associated with him became unbear- 
able, and the young poet was forced to sever his con- 
nection with the theatre. To stay in London and not 
to be near the idol of his infatuation, was impossible. 
He applied to his old college friend, the Earl of 
Plymouth, for a post in the army. Although the Treaty 
of Westminster, in 1674, had brought the war with 
Holland to a nominal close, fighting still went on on 



Thomas Otway 317 

the Continent, and the Duke of Monmouth had an 
army at the service of the King of France. Otway 
obtained a cornet's commission under the Duke, and 
went over in a new regiment to fight in Flanders. 
He left behind him a comedy, which his quarrel 
with Rochester did not prevent Betterton from pro- 
ducing. 

With the exception of Etheredge, who lived apart 
and seldom wrote, no very excellent comic dramatist 
flourished in the Restoration period, properly so called. 
But there were several poets who produced no one 
consummate work, but a bulk of comedies which in 
the aggregate were a notable addition to literature. 
Of these, three names will occur to every reader 
as the most praiseworthy. Wycherley had wit. Shad- 
well had humour, Aphra Behn had vivacity. In all 
these qualities the two principal tragedians, Dryden 
and Otway, were inferior to each of these writers 
in his or her own vein, and in point of fact Otway 
made a very bad second to Dryden, even in this 
inferior rank. Otway^s three original comedies are 
simply appalling. The old comedy of whimsicality 
had died with Shirley and Jasper Mayne, and 
though Etheredge had invented or introduced the 
new comedy of intrigue, it had taken no root, and 
was to be inaugurated afresh by Congreve. There is 
no drearier reading than a series of early Restora- 
tion comedies. The greatest reward the reader can 
expect is a grain of wit here and there, a lively situa- 
tion, a humorous phase of successful rascahty. The 
general character of the pieces is given by Otway, 



31 8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

with singular frankness, through the mouth of his 
Lady Squeamish : — 

'' And then their Comedies nowadays are the filthiest things, 
full of nauseous doings, which they mistake for raillery and 
intrigue : besides, they have no wit in 'em neither, for all their 
gentlemen and men of wit, as they style 'em, are either silly 
conceited impudent coxcombs, or else rude unmannerly drunken 
fellows, faugh 1 " 

The artificial comedy of the next generation was 
loose and frivolous, indeed without any sense of 
morahty or immorality at all, but it was innocuous in 
its fantastic and airy unearthliness, so that no one could 
really be much injured by it, and only a pedant much 
scandahsed. In Otway^s atrocious comedies there is 
equally little fear of injury to the moral sense of the 
auditor or reader, for the characters bear scarcely the 
faintest resemblance to human creatures, and their sins 
fill us with the mere loathing of an ugly thing drawn 
by an unskilful hand. The horrible puppets, in fact, 
Kke the figures in the base prints of the period, gibber 
and skip over the stage with imbecile gestures and a 
grin on their impossible faces. 

The only legitimate raison-cV etre of the persons in an 
artificial comedy is that they should amuse. The light 
creations of Congreve and Vanbrugh completely justify 
their creation, for they do amuse us heartily all through 
— those of us, that is, who in this day of the worship of 
realism can venture to be amused by pure literature 
at all. But Otway's comedies — and they are typical of 
a class — do not perform the one slender function for 
which they came into existence. No faint shadow of 



Thomas Otway 319 



a smile passes over our faces as we drag through the 
dreary and repulsive scenes of Friendship in Fashion. 
It is the saddest fooling, and we wish at every scene 
that this were the last, and that the poor little 
marionettes might be decently shut up again in their 
box and forgotten. And yet there is evidence on 
record that this was an extremely successful play. It 
was revived in 1749, but the audience of that date 
could not endure it for an hour, and it was hissed off 
the stage for good and all. 

There are some interesting points, however, con- 
nected with Friendship in Fashion, When it was 
printed, in 1678, it was dedicated to the Earl of Dorset ; 
in this dedication Otway speaks of himself as work- 
ing hard for his daily bread, and as surrounded by 
slanderous enemies. His tone is at once timorous and 
defiant, and he speaks of himself as worse treated by 
the critics than a bear is by the Bankside Butchers. 
The play was probably acted and printed while Otway 
was away in Flanders, for so autobiographical a writer 
could not have omitted to mention the sufferings of 
that ill-starred adventure. It seems that he was widely 
accused of libelling some person or persons in Friend- 
ship in Fashion ; he strenuously denies the charge, and 
in an air so heavy with invective it would be difficult 
to determine the exact ground of the rumour. Those 
who will take the pains to read this tedious drama 
will perceive that Congreve deigned to remember it in 
the composition of his exquisite masterpiece. Love for 
Love. The hero in each case is named Valentine, and 
Malagene, Otway^s tiresome button-holer and secret- 



320 Seventeenth Century Studies 

monger, is a clumsy prototype of the inimitable 
Tattle. But the resemblance is very slight, and I 
almost owe the genius of Congreve an apology for 
suggesting it. 

Otway's military excursion proved a lamentable 
failure. As we had declared peace with Holland, it 
was only in an underhand and unofficial manner that 
English soldiers could fight in the Low Countries as 
auxiliaries of France. On the loth of August hostilities 
finally closed with the Peace of Nijmegen, signed in 
the Raadhuis between Louis XIV., Charles of Spain, 
and the States General. The English troops under 
the Duke of Monmouth were treated with infamous 
neglect; they were disbanded, and allowed to go 
whither they would, no means of transport home being 
provided. They were paid not in money, but with 
debentures, which it was extremely difficult to get 
cashed, and which are frequently ridiculed in the 
political lampoons of the period. The unlucky Otway 
got back to London, ragged and starved, with his 
tattered garments full of vermin, an unsavoury par- 
ticular which was not missed by his rhyming enemies. 
The Earl of Rochester in particular had the indecency 
to introduce this mishap and its consequences into a 
doggerel Session of the Poets ^ which did equal discredit 
to his heart and head. Otway, however, was not yet 
crushed by adverse fate, and he sat down to write 
another comedy for his faithful allies at the Duke's 
Theatre. The Soldier's Fortune^ acted probably in 
1679, but not printed until 1681, is perhaps the only 
play of the time which is not dedicated to a person of 



Thomas Otway 321 

quality. It is merely inscribed to Mr. Bentley, the 
stationer, or as we should now say, the publisher. 

" I am not a little proud," Otway says, " that it has happened 
into my thoughts to be the first who in these latter years has 
made an Epistle Dedicatory to his Stationer. It is a compH- 
ment as reasonable as it is just. For, Mr. Bentley, you pay 
honestly for the copy, and an epistle to you is a sort of acquit- 
tance, and may probably be welcome ; when to a person of 
higher rank and order, it looks like an obligation for praises, 
which he knows he does not deserve, and therefore is very 
unwilling to part with ready money for." 

It was the habit for every person of high rank to 
whom a book was dedicated to present the author with 
a gift of money. This noisome custom did not die out 
until late in the following century. In this instance 
the courtesies were reversed, for the prologue, very 
tolerably written, was contributed by Otway^s old 
college friend. Lord Falkland. In the epilogue Otway 
describes himself as 

" Full of those thoughts that make the unhappy sad, 
And by imagination half grown mad, 

and pours out a querulous complaint about *' starving 
poets " wrecked by cruel fate, which must have struck 
a jarring chord at the close of a frivolous comedy. The 
play is full of autobiographical allusions to disbanded 
soldiers, debentures, ill food, and the hardships of war ; 
but perhaps the most curious point of all is in the 
preface, where, in answer to some great lady who 
objected to the indecency of the plot, he quotes Mrs. 
Behn, of all possible females, in defence of its propriety. 
" I have heard a lady, that has more modesty than any 

X 



322 Seventeenth Century Studies 

of these she-critics, and I am sure more wit, say she 
wondered at the impudence of any of her sex who 
would pretend to an opinion on such a matter." Poor 
Mrs. Behn, good honest creature, has come, in the 
whirligig of time, to be looked upon as the last person 
in all known literature to mark the standard of dra- 
matic delicacy. And yet there was a time when a 
copy of light verses was considered in good taste if 
the fastidious Astraea could approve of it. 

Hitherto Otway had subsisted upon the proceeds of 
one play a year. In 1680 he seems to have made a 
supreme effort to free himself from his liabilities, for 
in it he produced two plays and his only important 
poem. Moreover, one of these plays is so immeasurably 
superior to anything he had hitherto produced, as to 
justify his admirers in hoping that he had taken a new 
lease of his genius. His rival and enemy, the hated 
Rochester, had for some months been sinking under 
delirium tremens ; and, haunted by the terrors of his 
complaint, had sought ghostly comfort from Bishop 
Burnet. On July 26 he died, having ceased to be 
troublesome since the beginning of the year. There 
is an unusual sprightly hopefulness about the prologue 
and preface of The Orphan^ as if a weight had been 
removed and the poet was nearing the fulfilment of 
his wishes. The dedication was accepted by ^' Her 
R.H. the Dutchess;" not, of course, the Duchess of 
Cleveland, as Voltaire oddly enough supposed, but 
Mary d'Este, the unlucky Duchess of York. 

The poetical reputation of Otway rests, or should 
rest, on his three best tragedies ; and of these it may 



Thomas Otway 323 

be said that The Orphan is as far superior to Don 
Carlos as Venice Preserved is superior to it. The 
epoch of rhymed tragedies had passed away since Don 
Carlos was written. Dryden had inaugurated the 
return to blank verse with his All for Love^ in 1678, 
and Lee with Mithridates in the same year. Otway 
followed their good example, and with no less zeal; 
for he also carefully studied the fountain-head of 
dramatic blank verse in Shakespeare. In The Orphan 
we feel at once that we breathe a freer air and tread 
on firmer ground; there is less rhetoric and more 
nature, less passion and more tenderness. The plot 
of this once so famous play is nowadays sufficiently 
unfamiliar to justify me in briefly analysing it. A 
retired nobleman, Acasto, lives at his country seat 
with his two sons Castalio and Polydore, men of great 
ambition and fiery purpose, but still very young and 
curbed by their father's authority. They have, more- 
over, a sister — Serina. A young girl, Monimia, the 
orphan daughter of an old friend of Acasto's, has been 
brought up with these children, and is now a woman 
of the gentlest beauty. Castalio and Polydore have 
each fallen unawares into love with their father's ward, 
and in the opening scenes of the play we are introduced 
to their trustful mutual affection and then to the dis- 
turbing influence of this awakened passion. Castalio 
and Monimia, however, have secretly come to an 
understanding; but Castalio, from a foolish desire to 
let his brother down gently, feigns comparative indiffer- 
ence to Monimia, and even gives Polydore leave to 
win her if he can. At this moment Chamont, the 



324 Seventeenth Century Studies 

brother of Monimia, appears on the scene and claims 
the ready hospitality of Acasto. He is a bluff, honest, 
but brutal and petulant soldier, and his presence is 
disturbing in the quiet household. He has formed a 
suspicion that Monimia has been wronged by one of 
the young men, and he annoys her with his rude and 
tactless questions. Meanwhile Acasto is taken suddenly 
ill, and Castalio and Monimia take advantage of the 
confusion to be privately married by the chaplain. 
Polydore, believing his brother to have no serious 
claim upon Monimia, happening to overhear them pro- 
posing a tryst in the night, comes beforehand in the 
darkness to Monimia's chamber, and is not discovered. 
CastaHo, coming later, is excluded, and curses his wife 
for her supposed heartlessness and insubordination. 
The sequel may well be imagined. Ruin and anguish 
fall upon the brothers, but most of all on the innocent 
and agonised Monimia, who finally takes poison, while 
Castalio stabs himself. 

There are many faults in the construction of this 
plot, besides the indelicacy of the main situation, which 
has long banished it from the stage. The foolish pre- 
tence of Castalio, the want of perception shown by 
Monimia, the impossible and ruffianly crime of Poly- 
dore — for which no just preparation is made in the 
sketch of his character — all these are radical faults 
which go near to destroy the probability of the story. 
But if we once accept these weak points and forget 
them, the play is full of delicate and charming turns of 
action, of decisive characterisation, and of intense and 
tear-compelling pathos. The old patriot Acasto, a study 



Thomas Otway 325 

drawn, it is said, from the first Duke of Ormonde, is 
a noble figure of a patriotic servant of his country, 
shrinking in old age from the frivolity of a court, and 
studying rather a simple and patriarchal life among his 
tenantry. In the noisy soldier Chamont, a fierce and 
turbulent but not ill-meaning person, Otway produced 
a highly-finished portrait of a type with which his 
foreign adventures had no doubt made him only too 
familiar. CastaHo is the veering, passionate, hot- 
headed man whom Otway invariably draws as his 
hero. This time the character is even more fervid 
and perverse than ever, and we are on the point of 
scorning him for his want of resolution, when the 
insupportable tide of sorrows that overwhelms him 
enforces our pity and sympathy. 

Over the character of Monimia probably more tears 
have been shed than over that of any stage heroine. 
As long as the laxity of public speech still permitted 
the presentation of The Orphan^ no audience of any 
sensibility could endure the fourth and fifth acts of 
this play without melting into audible weeping. It 
was one of Mrs. Barry^s most celebrated parts, and it 
would seem as though Otway had wilfully put his 
breast to the torture by heaping up, with lingering 
hands, all the turns and phrases which could enhance 
the trembling agony and helpless beauty of his 
mistress. He, like poor Castalio, was left outside to 
the night and the storm ; and he tried to console him- 
self by vainly imagining that his exquisite Monimia was 
unconscious of the wrong she did him. 

The force of Otway's language does not consist in 



326 Seventeenth Century Studies 

flowery beauties that can be detached in quotation; 
he is not a poet from whom much of a very effective 
nature can be selected. His stroke was broad and 
bold, and when he did succeed, it was in figures of 
an heroic size and on a grand scale. The peculiar 
tenderness, and still more the lingering passion of 
grief which steep the whole play, are felt more in- 
tensely at a second reading than a first. The Orphan 
is not a masculine work, but it might be the crowning 
memorial of some woman whom great ambition and 
still greater sorrow had forged into a poet. 

The other tragedy of the same year, The History 
and Fall of Caius MarmSy is merely a kind of cento, 
the language of Shakespeare being transferred whole- 
sale into the mouths of Otway's characters. There 
was no bad faith in this; the author announced in 
the prologue, which was a reverent eulogy on his 
great predecessor, that the audience would find that 
he had rifled Shakespeare of half a play — in point of 
fact, oi Romeo and Juliet y with reminiscences oi Julius 
CcBsar. Of course such a performance is scarcely to 
be mentioned among the original works of Otway, 
and it has no further importance than belongs to the 
curious fact that for a couple of generations it super- 
seded Romeo and Juliet on the English stage. It was 
dedicated to the Earl of Falkland in a preface which 
contains a graceful allusion to the venerable Waller, 
the last survivor of the poets who had lived in Shake- 
speare- s lifetime. Lavinia, the principal character, who 
spoke the words written for Juliet, was acted to per- 
fection by Mrs. Barry, who had now attained that 



Thomas Otway 327 

majestic beauty and serenity, which she still retained 
even in Colley Cibber^s early days. From the epilogue 
we learn that the poet usually had his benefit on the 
third night, and that sometimes he mortgaged his 
gains before they came into his pocket. The lines 
are melancholy enough in all conscience. 

** Our Poet says, one day to a play ye come 
Which serves you half a year for wit at home, 
But which among you is there to be found 
Will take his third day's pawn for fifty pound ? 
Or, now he is cashier'd, will fairly venture 
To give him ready money for's debenture ? 
Therefore, when he received that fatal doom. 
This play came forth, in hope his friends would come 
To help a poor disbanded soldier home." 

In the same year, 1680, the '' poor disbanded soldier *^ 
published a poem in quarto, entitled Tke Poefs Com- 
plaint of his Muse J which gives some vague memoir of 
himself, and much violent satire of his enemies. The 
opening of his poem is vigorous and picturesque, like 
a roughly-etched bit of barren landscape. 

" To a high hill, where never yet stood tree, 
Where only heath, coarse fern, and furzes grow, 

Where, nipt by piercing air, 
The flocks in tattered fleeces hardly graze, 

Led by uncouth thoughts and care, 
Which did too much his pensive mind amaze, 
A wandering Bard, whose Muse was crazy grown, 
Cloy'd with the nauseous follies of the buzzing town, 
Came, look'd about him, sighed, and laid him down." 

The Bard, who is plainly Mr. Thomas Otway, 
presently proceeds to give an account of his own early 



32 8 Seventeenth Century Studies 

life, and the tyrannous empire of his Muse, at once his 
mistress and his fate. He then proceeds to denounce, 
under thin disguises, his principal enemies, and in the 
forefront, Rochester, Shadwell, and Settle. The poem 
thus develops into a series of tolerably transparent 
political allegories, and closes with a passionate eulogy 
of the Duke of York, and a mournful description of 
his leaving England. The whole poem, which is well 
written and interesting, literally teems with the excite- 
ment of the Popish plots, then at the height of their 
vogue) and Otway was now a Tory, like Dryden. 

There is still the same troubled sense of Titus Oates 
and his meaner brood of terrorists in the title of 
Otway's next play, Venice Preserved^ or a Plot Dis- 
coveredy which was produced in February 1682. The 
author only half deprecates such a belief in the pro- 
logue, as he briefly reviews the events that had excited 
popular apprehension. His preface does not tell us 
how he had been employed since 1680, but, in address- 
ing the Duchess of Portsmouth, he extols her bounty, 
extended to her poet in his extremity. We are there- 
fore justified in concluding that Otway had begun to 
suffer the last miseries of poverty. There is no dimi- 
nution of power, however, in this drama, written out 
of the depths. In fact, as we all know, it is simply 
the greatest tragic drama between Shakespeare and 
Shelley. Out of the dead waste of the Restoration, 
with all its bustling talent and vain show, this one 
solitary work of supreme genius rose unexpected and 
unimitated. 

There is nothing in any previous writing of Otway's, 



Thomas Otway 329 

nothing even in the moving and feminine pathos of The 
Orphan^ which would lead us to await so noble and so 
solid a masterpiece as Venice Preserved, The poetic 
glow and irregular beauty of Elizabethan tragedy, its 
iyric outbursts, its fantastic and brilliant flashes of 
insight, its rich variety and varied melody, give the 
early plays a place in our affections which surpasses 
what is purely owing to their theatrical excellence. In 
Venice Preserved the poetic element is always severely 
subordinated to the dramatic ; there are no flowers of 
fancy, no charming episodes introduced to give literary 
gusto to a reader. All is designed for the true home 
of the drama, the stage, and without being in the least 
stagey, this theatrical aim is carried out with the most 
complete success. There are few plays in existence 
so original and so telling in construction as this ; the 
plot is in almost every respect worthy to be Shake- 
speare's. The only point in which any weakness can 
be traced is the motive actuating Jaffier to join the 
conspirators. The revenge of a merely private wrong 
upon a whole commonwealth is scarcely sane enough 
for the dignity of tragedy. 

The story may be briefly given. Jaffier, a noble 
young Venetian, had secretly married Belvidera, the 
daughter of a proud and wealthy senator, Priuli, who 
in consequence disowns her. The young couple fall 
into great poverty, and at the opening of the piece 
Jaffier is begging Priuli to assist them, but his en- 
treaties are met with injurious insults. His pride is 
up in arms, and at that moment he meets his friend 
Pierre, a soldier to whom the Senate of Venice has 



33^ Seventeenth Century Studies 

refused his just rewards, and who is embittered against 
the state. He enflames Jaffier by describing the fate 
of Belvidera, the injuries done to Jaffier, and the 
sorrows that will fall upon their children. They part 
with a promise to meet at midnight and consult still 
further. At midnight Jaffier accordingly meets Pierre 
on the Rialto, and after testing the temper of his friend, 
Pierre confides to him that a plot is on the eve of 
being hatched, and offers to introduce him to the con- 
spirators. This is accordingly done, but as they are 
jealous of the honesty of the new-comer, Jaffier gives 
Belvidera into the charge of the leader, an old man 
named Renault. As it is impossible to explain the 
reason of this to Belvidera, she goes off in great 
distress, and as in the course of the night Renault 
offers to insult her, she breaks away, and flying to her 
husband, entreats him to explain to her his cruel and 
unaccountable conduct. He has sworn not to divulge 
the plot, but as she begs him to do so, and assures him 
of her complete devotion to his will, he gradually loses 
his self-control, and at last confides to her the secret. 
Her first thought is that her father is one of the 
Senate, and is therefore to be among the victims. 
She implores Jaffier to relent, and at last persuades 
him, much against his will, to go to the Senate and 
reveal the plot, claiming as his reward the lives of 
the conspirators. 

Jaffier is finally convinced that it is his duty to do 
this, and, much as he loathes his bad faith, he actually 
goes before the Senate, and declares the plot. The 
conspirators are in consequence arrested in time, and 



Thomas Otway 331 



their design completely paralysed. At first the friends, 
seeing Jaffier bound, believe him to be the partner of 
their misfortune, but, discovering their mistake, they 
load him with the heaviest reproaches, and, scornfully 
rejecting pardon, they claim an instant death. Pierre 
especially pours out the vials of his wrath on Jaffier, 
and the unfortunate man breaks down in an agony 
of humiliation and remorse. The faithless senators 
decree a cruel death to the conspirators, and Jaffier 
threatens Belvidera that he with his own hands will 
stab her unless she forces a pardon for them from her 
father Priuli. Her charms prevail, but Priuli^s inter- 
vention comes too late. Belvidera goes mad ; Jaffier 
struggles to the foot of the scaffold where Pierre is 
about to be executed, and stabs his friend first and 
then himself to the heart with a dagger. Belvidera 
dies of a broken heart at their feet, and the scene 
closes. 

To give an idea of the vigour and beauty of this 
play, it would be necessary to quote a longer fragment 
than could conveniently be given here. A single 
speech of Belvidera and the reply of Jaffier must 
suffice ; they are considering the necessity of a life in 
poverty and exile. 

" Bel. O I will love thee, even in madness love thee ! 
Tho' my distracted senses should forsake me, 
Fd find some intervals, when my poor heart 
Should 'swage itself, and be let loose to thine. 
Tho' the bare earth be all our resting-place, 
Its roots our food, some clift our habitation, 
I'll make this arm a pillow for thy head ; 
And as thou sighing l^st, and swelled with sorrow, 



332 Seventeenth Century Studies 

Creep to thy bosom, pour the balm of love 
Into thy soul, and kiss thee to thy rest, 
Then praise our God, and watch thee till the morning. 
Jaff, Hear this, you Heavens ! and wonder how you 
made her ; 
Reign, reign, ye monarchs that divide the world : 
Busy rebellion ne'er will let you know 
Tranquillity and happiness like mine ; 
Like gaudy ships, the obsequious billows fall 
And rise again, to lift you in your pride ; 
They wait but for a storm, and then devour you : 
I, in my private bark already wrecked, — 
Like a poor merchant, driven on unknown land. 
That had by chance packed up his choicest treasure 
In one dear casket, and saved only that, — 
Since I must wander farther on the shore. 
Thus hug my little, but my precious store, 
Resolv'd to scorn, and trust my fate no more." 

The character of Belvidera is one of the most ex- 
quisite, most lovable in literature. A thorough woman 
in her impulse, her logic, and her intensity of passion, 
she rules her husband by her very sweetness, and 
melts the scruples that no violence could have divided. 
The scene in which she persuades him that duty calls 
him to betray the conspirators, because her own heart 
yearns to save her father, is one of consummate skill 
and truth, and the gradual yielding of Jaffier's irre- 
solute will before her feminine reasoning and absolute 
conviction is worthy of Shakespeare himself. No 
praise can possibly be withheld from the most delicate 
and vivid passages in Venice Preserved ; it is only 
where the interest of necessity flags, and above all 
in the nauseous comic passages, that we miss the 
presence of a great lyrical and a great humorous 



Thomas Otway 333 

genius. Yet even here opinion may be divided, since 
no less a critic than M. Taine has found a Shake- 
spearian excellence in the comic scenes of this play. 
Throughout, the spirit of the drama is domestic and 
mundane; there are no flights into the spiritual 
heavens, no soundings of the dark and subtle secrets 
of the mind. The imagination of the poet is lucid, 
rapid, and direct ; there is the utmost clarity of state- 
ment and reflection ; in short, a masterpiece of genius 
is not obscured, but certainly toned down, by a uni- 
versal tinge or haze of the commonplace. The political 
bias of Venice Preserved is most clearly marked in the 
comic character of Antonio, a lecherous old senator, in 
whom the hated Shaftesbury was held up to ridicule, 
the portrait being exact enough even to include that 
statesman's weak ambition to be elected King of 
Poland. 

For the acting rights of The Orphan and for Venice 
Preserved^ two of the most brilliantly successful plays 
of the period, Otway only received ^lOO a piece ; what 
is still more astonishing is, that for the copyright of 
the latter Jacob Tonson gave him only £1^^, He 
probably made a few pounds by a prologue for Mrs. 
Behn's City Heiress^ which was separately printed on 
a single sheet, in 1682. In Monimia and Belvidera 
Mrs. Barry simply took the town by storm. Her 
acting was by this time perfection, and her personal 
attractions were at their zenith. '^ She had," we are 
told by Gibber, ''a presence of elevated dignity, her 
mien and motion were superb and gracefully majestick, 
and her voice was clear, full, and strong." It seems 



334 Seventeenth Century Studies 

to have been in this year, 1682, that Otway made a 
last effort to secure the love of this cold and beautiful 
woman, whose worldly success he had done so much 
to enhance : the letters we possess are six in number, 
a waif preserved perhaps by accident, and first printed 
long after his death. In the first two he reminds her 
of his unbroken constancy, of his patience and passion, 
his indulgence and hope, and entreats her to take 
mercy on a lover who has suffered the agonies of 
desire for seven weary years. He tells her that her 
cruelty has driven him to find solace in noisy pleasures 
and in wine, but that with solitude and sobriety her 
torturing image has never ceased to return and tor- 
ment him. The third letter, sprightly and fantastic, 
contrasts with the yearning and melancholy appeal of 
the former two. He rallies her on an idle threat to 
leave the world, and takes upon himself, as a member 
of that world, to divert her from so ill-natured an 
inclination. The fourth is brief and passionate; he 
wrestles with her, as though he would force her 
frivolous coquetry into a serious declaration of love, 
and he tells her he can bear no longer the alternation 
of kind looks and cruel denials. The fifth letter is 
rough and inelegant in language ; he storms at her 
with violent indignation, and denounces her vanity 
and selfishness with the sharpest irony. The sixth, 
the shortest of all and the saddest, quietly remarks 
that, in accordance with her promise to meet him in 
the Mall, he was there at the appointed hour, but she 
never came, and that he now begs her for the favour 
of one genuine assignation, that he may really know 



Thomas Otway 335 

whether he may '' hereafter, for your sake, either bless 
all your bewitching sex, or, as often as I henceforth 
think of you, curse womankind for ever." 

Here this tantalising but priceless fragment of corre- 
spondence ceases, but we know that the answer was 
for cursing and not for blessing. From this point 
Otway^s ruin was but a question of months ; his genius 
did not long survive his passion. He had now few 
friends left to help him. His one faithful ally, the 
Earl of Plymouth, had died in 1680. Otway ^s con- 
version to the Tory party had softened Dryden^s 
animosity a little, but not to the extent of any very 
warm recognition. Plunged in drunken misery, Otway 
remains almost invisible to us until 1684, when he 
seemed to make a final effort to regain a place in 
society. He wrote in that year a prologue to Lee's 
Constantine the Great, and produced a play of his own. 
The Atheist, This, his last drama, is a comedy, a 
sequel to The Soldier's Fortune, with the same char- 
acters, the vile company of the Dunces and Sir Jolly 
being happily excluded. It is, however, a very poor 
performance. The gross adulation of the preface to 
the eldest son of the Marquis of Halifax is enough to 
show how low the poet had fallen; the epilogue was 
written by Duke. 

Charles II. died early in February 1685, and Otway 
instantly seized the opportunity to publish a quarto 
poem entitled Windsor Castle, in which he praised the 
dead king and exulted over the accession of James. 
He had been always loyal to the Duke of York, and 
he hoped now to be remembered, but scarcely was his 



336 Seventeenth Century Studies 

poem published than he sank under the weight of 
destitution. He found it impossible to borrow any 
more money; he was already ;^400 in the debt of 
Captain Symonds, a vintner. It appears that he spent 
his last days in a wretched spunging-house on Tower 
Hill, a place known by the sign of the Bull. Accord- 
ing to one account he ventured out at the point of 
starvation, and begged a passer-by for alms, saying at 
the same time, '^ I am Otway the poet ! ^^ The gentle- 
man, shocked to see so great a genius in such a con- 
dition, gave him a guinea, with which Otway rushed 
to the nearest baker's, ravenously swallowed a piece 
of bread, and died at once, choked by the first mouth- 
ful. This occurred on April 14, 1685. 

Many years afterwards, apparently to cover the 
scandalous fact that the greatest tragic poet of the age 
was allowed to starve to death in London in his thirty- 
fourth year, a new story was circulated to the effect 
that Otway died of a fever caught by chasing the 
murderer of a friend of his from London to Dover on 
foot. There seems no foundation, however, for this. 
No newspaper of the period is known to have announced 
his death. In 1686 there appeared a sorry piece of 
hackwork under his name. The History of the TriMm- 
virate^ translated from the French ; and in November 
of the same year Betterton advertised for a tragedy 
by Mr. Otway, of which four acts were known to be 
written when he died. During the winter of the same 
year the great manager repeated his advertisements, 
and then there was no more heard of this lost play. 
But more than thirty years later, in 17 19, two obscure 



Thomas Otway 337 

booksellers issued a tragedy, Heroick Friendships which 
they attributed on the title-page to ''the late Mr. 
Otway." They gave no sort of explanation of the 
means by which they obtained it, and their publication 
was at once discredited, and has been ridiculed by 
every editor of Otway. I lay myself open, I fear, to 
the charge of credulity if I confess that I am not quite 
ready to accept this universal verdict. 

The play called Heroick Friendship is in blank verse 
of very unequal merit ; some of it is of the very basest 
flatness, some of it has buoyancy and rhetorical vigour 
to a remarkable degree. It is most vilely edited, evi- 
dently from a cursive manuscript or first draft; on 
every page there are passages which the transcriber 
has misread, and phrases that are feebly finished, as 
though an unskilful hand had patched them. There 
are not a few lines that are absolutely unintelligible, 
and it is a noticeable fact that these corruptions occur 
only in the most poetical passages ; the flat and insipid 
scenes are clear enough. If this play had been put 
before us without an author's name, we should be in- 
clined to pronounce that two persons had been at 
work on it, and that it had been printed from a tran- 
script of a rough, unfinished manuscript, the tran- 
script being by the same person who completed the 
play. I do not think that it has been noticed that 
Betterton had not been long dead when this tragedy 
was printed by Mears and King. My own impression 
is that those booksellers obtained it by some under- 
hand means from persons who had access to the effects 
of Betterton, and this would account for their silence 

Y 



338 Seventeenth Century Studies 



when called upon to show the credentials of the play. 
If it be asked why had Betterton concealed it for a 
quarter of a century, when he had eagerly advertised 
for it, the answer I would suggest would be that he 
received the rough manuscript in answer to his advertise- 
ment, set to work as well as he could to copy it out 
and to complete it, and when he had finished was so 
little pleased with the result that he put it on one side. 
In an uncritical age no one cared for imperfect works 
by a great man, unless they could be completed and 
used. There were no bibliographers to secure the 
manuscript of Dryden^s Ladies a la Mode^ and no 
interest would have been felt in a rough draft by 
Otway. 

So much for external speculation ; of internal evi- 
dence I have also something to bring forward. Im- 
perfect as the execution is, the plot and idea of Heroick 
Friendship are exceedingly characteristic of Otway. 
The story is briefly told: it concerns itself with the 
Roman occupation of Britain. A mythical King 
Arbelline has a brother Guiderius, of whose claim to 
the throne he is jealous ; this brother loves a British 
lady, Aurosia, to whom the king makes overtures. In 
her terror she urges her lover to rebellion, to which 
he is further pressed by his dearest friend, Decimus, 
a Roman. Arbelline, discovering the love of Aurosia 
for Guiderius, determines on his ruin. He is arrested 
and sentenced to death. In order that he may take a 
farewell of his mistress, Decimus offers to take his 
place in prison for a night and a day, which his 
friend spends with Aurosia. At the end of that time 



Thomas Otway 339 

Guiderius hurries back to release Decimus, but is 
followed and over-persuaded b}- Aurosia, who cannot 
bear to part with him. This vacillating lover, ever 
convinced against his will by feminine blandishments, 
is the fellow-creation, surely, of Castalio and Jaflfier. 
The first act, I am convinced, is all Otway's, though 
doubtless patched and tagged by an inferior hand. 
The following passage, for instance, in spite of some 
textual confusion in the end of the first speech, is most 
characteristic of the author, who triumphs in a lover's 
parting : — 

^^ Aur, Go then, be every influence propitious, 
And all the stars as fond of thee as I am ! 
May the Gods join with thee, and justly move 
Against a tyrant in the cause of love, 
Drive him to death, and when he breathless lies, 
Lead the dear victor to the Elysian Gardens. 
There on the river's brink, within his view, 
Haste, haste his way for me to crown his conquest. 

Guid. But should the King by force ! — by force ! — -O Gods ! 

Aur, Though ever^^thing should aid his hated passion. 
Doubt not Aurosia's spirit nor her faith ; 
But I must go, or be suspected here, — 
A worser evil, if a worse can be, 
Than that of parting with thee ; oh farewell ! 

Guid. Stay ! Let me take a lover's farewell of thee ! — 
One dear embrace, film as my faith ! O blessing ! 
Thou balmy softness, as the morning sweet, 
When the glad lark with mounting music charms 
The mild unclouded heavens." 

The rest of the play is unworthy of the first act, but 
there are passages throughout the second and third 
acts which may be confidently attributed to Otway. If 



340 Seventeenth Century Studies 

the works of the poet are edited again, Heroick Friend- 
ship should by no means be omitted. 

In person Otway was handsome and portly, with a 
fine air. Dryden, in tardy acknowledgment, admitted 
that '' charming his face was, charming was his verse ; '* 
and the best accredited portrait that we possess of 
him, that by John Ryley in the Chesterfield Collection, 
shows that '^charming" was exactly the right adjective 
to use. The face is of a full clear oval, suave and 
bright. We see before us the countenance of a 
gracious, amorous person, with more wit than wisdom, 
unfit to battle with the world, and fallen on troublous 
times. My own impression of Otway is that he closely 
resembled the character of Valentine in Love for Love^ 
save that, alas ! no beneficent deity crowned him with 
fortune and Angelica in the last act. 

Any account of the writings of Otway would be in- 
complete without some allusion to his relation with the 
great French dramatists, his contemporaries; and yet 
to enter into this at all fully would lead us beyond our 
limits. In point of time he was the coeval of Quinault 
and Racine, both of whom outlived him, but his intellec- 
tual kinship is much rather with Rotrou and Corneille. 
The masterpieces of le grand Co7meille had a profound 
influence on Betterton, and through him on the Eng- 
lish poets who wrote for him. Of these Otway kept 
the closest to the severity of the French classicists. 
Dryden, in his vain search for novelty, tried every 
species of tragic subject, and, until near his end, failed 
in each. Lee, with a great deal of inherent genius, 
struck at once on the rock of bombast. Otway alone 



Thomas Otway 341 

understood the tragic force of pity and tears, and at 
this point he came very near excelhng all the French 
tragedians. 

It is impossible not to compare with the brief sad life 
of the young English poet that of the young French 
poet whose life ceased in such a noble apotheosis six 
months before Otway^s birth. Rotrou and Otway each 
wrote many dramas ; each produced one of great and 
another of supreme excellence ; the career of each was 
cut off in youth by calamity. But while the one was 
the victim of his own weakness and of public neglect, 
the other freely surrendered his life to an adorable 
sentiment of duty. In mental as in moral fibre, the 
author of Saint-Genest and Venceslas surpassed the 
poet of The Orphan and Venice Preserved^ but there 
is something similar in the character of their writ- 
ings, with this curious exception, that in his highest 
beauties Rotrou approaches the EngHsh poetic type, 
while Otway^s finest passages are those in which he is 
most French. 

These passages led to his being early admired and 
imitated in Paris ; and several French tragedies, parti- 
cularly the Ma?zlius Capitolinus of Antoine de la Fosse, 
published in 1698, show the influence which Otway 
exercised abroad. This partiality was rudely attacked 
by Voltaire, whose criticism of Otway was at one time 
famous, and did much to bring the poet into discredit. 
It is to be found in the same volume of the Melanges 
Litteraires which contains the notorious analysis of 
Hamlet. The plot of The Orphan is what he mainly 
dwells upon. He has no words sufficiently contemp- 



342 Seventeenth Century Studies 

tuous for these clumsy inventions of le tendre Otway^ 
in whom he is not prepared to admit a single merit. 
Voltaire, rare and delicate critic as he was, was yet 
too profoundly out of sympathy with English verse 
to be able to judge it at all. French criticism in the 
present century has been far more just to the claims 
of Otway, and Taine in particular has given him praise 
which to an English ear sounds excessive. 



APPENDIX 

Page 216. — To this challenge Mr. Lowell replied in 
words which it gives me a melancholy pleasure to 
reprint : — 

" Whatever my other shortcomings (and they are plenty, 
as none knows better than I), want of reflection is not 
one of them. The poems were all intended for public 
recitation. That was the first thing to be considered. 
I suppose my ear (from long and painful practice on 
<^. B. K. poems) has more technical experience in this 
than almost any. The least tedious measure is the 
rhymed heroic, but this, too, palls, unless relieved by 
passages of wit or even mere fun. A long series of 
uniform stanzas (I am always speaking of public recita- 
tion) with regularly recurring rhymes produces somnolence 
among the men and a desperate resort to their fans on 
the part of the women. No method has yet been invented 
by which the train of thought or feeling can be shunted 
off from the epical to the lyrical track. My ears have been 
jolted often enough over the sleepers on such occasions 
to know that. I know something (of course an American 
can't know much) about Pindar; but his odes had the 
advantage of being chanted. Now, my problem was to 
contrive a measure which should not be tedious by 

uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in 

343 



344 Appendix 

which the transitions (including those of the voice) should 
be managed without jar. I at first thought of mixed 
rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those 
in the choruses of Sa?nson Agonistes^ which are in the 
main masterly. Of course, Milton deliberately departed 
from that stricter form of the Greek chorus to which it 
was bound quite as much (I suspect) by the law of its 
musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. 
I wrote some stanzas of the Commemoration Ode on 
this theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme 
to match. But my ear was better pleased when the 
rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo 
rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect 
almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling 
an association and faint reminiscence of consonance. I 
think I have succeeded pretty well, and if you try reading 
aloud, I believe you will agree with me. The sentiment 
of the Concord Ode demanded a larger proportion of 
lyrical movements, of course, than the others. Harmony, 
without sacrifice of melody, was what I had mainly in 
view." 



INDEX 



Adve7iture of Five Hours, Tuke's, 

251. 
Alarum against Usurers, Lodge's, 

7, 10, 13, 22. 
Alchemist, Jonson's, 128. 
Alcibiades, Otway's, 305, 308-10, 

313- 
Annalia Dubrensia, 113. 
Apology for Poetry , Sidney's, 7. 
Appius and Virgi?tia, Webster's, 

71-74. 
Arnold, Matthew, 175, 242. 
As You Like It, 18. 
Atheist, The, Otway's, 335. 
Ave Ccesar, Rowlands', loi. 

Baldwin, Prudence, Herrick's ser- 

; vant, 135, 142. 

Bandello, 61. 

Barksdale, Clement, 106. 

Barry, Mrs., 284, 290, 307-10, 312, 

315, 316, 325-27, 333. 
Bartholo7new Fair, Jonson's, 129. 
Basse, William, 115. 
Beaumont, Joseph, 160, 166, 183. 
Beaumont and Fletcher,^o. 
Bchn, Mrs. Aphra, 23$, 229, 25^, 

3e^, 304, 314, 317, 321, 333. 
Belleau, Remy, La Bergerie, 154. 
Bespotted Jesuit, The, 159. 
Betterton, Thomas, 278, 303, 304, 

306-309, 336, 337, 340. 
Braithwaite, 83. 
Browne, William, 130, 143. 



Caius Marius, History of Otway's, 
326. 

Calls to, Crowne's, 308. 

Catharos, Lodge's, 27. 

Catiline, Jonson's, 129. 

Catullus, 152. 

Cavendish, Thomas, 24-27. 

Cervantes, 97. 

Chaucer, 85. 

Cheats of Scapin, The, Otway's, 
316. 

Christ, The Betraying of, Row- 
lands', 83. 

Civil War, The Wounds of. 
Lodge's, 31. 

Claudian, 177. 

Comical Revenge , The, Etheredge's, 
262, 265-70. 

Congreve, William, 280, 281, 318, 

319. 
Constantia and Philetus, Cowley's, 

194, 196. 
Corbet, Bishop, 146. 
Corneille's Pompie, 248 ; Horace, 

253 ; Menteur, 266 ; influence, 

340- 

Cotswold Gaines, The, Captain 
Dover's, 103-24. 

Cotterel, Sir Charles, 234, 241, 242, 
249. 

Cowley, Abraham, 136, 167, 183, 
, 186, 191-228, 231, 232 ; birth, 
192 ; precocity, 193 ; at West- 
minster School, 193-97 ; at Cam- 



345 



346 



Index 



bridge, 200 ; early fame, 202 ; 
Oxford transfer, 204 ; court exile, 
204 ; return, imprisonment, 205 ; 
studies medicine, 220; friends, 
222; retires from court, 222; 
death, 224 ; laudation, 224, 225 ; 
eulogy, 227. 

Crashaw, Richard, 157-90, 204, 
210 ; birth and parentage, 158 ; 
at Cambridge, 159-63 ; influenced 
by Little Gidding, 165 ; ejection, 
166; convert to Rome, 167; in 
Paris, 183; in Rome, ib., at 
Loreto, 184, 185, death, 186, 212. 

Crashaw, William, 158. 

Crepundia Siliana, 190. 

Crowne, John, 295, 300, 301, 308, 

315- 

Cure for a Cuckold, A, Webster's, 

49. 74-79. 
Curtain-Drawer of the World, 

Rowlands', 99. 
Cutter of Coleman Street, The, 

Cowley's, 204. 

Daniel, Samuel, 35, 116. 
Davenant, Sir William, 210, 227, 

247, 30s. 306. 
Davideis, Cowley's, 204, 218- 

220. 
Dekker, Thomas, 10, 43, 47, 48, 95. 
Delights of the Muses, Crashaw's, 

168. 
Denham, Sir John, 224, 227, 254. 
Dering, Sir Edward, 250. 
Devil Conjured, The, Lodge's, 36. 
Devil's Law Case, Webster's, 52, 53, 

67-71, 78. 
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 201. 
Diogenes Lanthorn^ Rowlands', 92, 

94. 
Doctor Merryman, Rowlands', 91. 
Don Carlos, Otway's, 310-14, 323. 
Don Simonides, Rich's, 8. 
Donne, Dr. John, 97, 207. 



Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 

295, 296. 
Dover, Captain Robert, 104-124. 
Downes, 304. 

Drayton, Michael, 8, 35, 115. 
Dryden, John, 216, jisf^, 060^2,6^, 

265, 295, 300, 306, 307, 314, 317, 

323» 340. 
Duchess of Malfy, Webster's, 50-52, 

59-67, 79. 
Duke, Richard, 305, 335. 
Dyce, Alexander, 61, 74. 

Elys, Rev. Edmund, 209, 223. 

England, The Four Ages of, 209. 

England s Helicon, '>fi, 40. 

England s Parnassus, 40. 

Ephelia, 255-58. 

Epigrammatum Sacrorum Libert. 
Crashaw's, 163. 

Essays, Cowley's, 223, 

Etheredge, Sir George, 259-98, 
317 ; his Letterbook, 260, 285 ; 
family history, 261 ; in France, 
262 ; plays in rhyme, 265 ; intro- 
duced to the wits, 270 ; popularity, 
275 ; in a brawl, 283 ; accident to, 
284 ; amours, 284 ; ambassador, 
285 ; life at Ratisbon, 286-96; his 
end, 297 ; person, 298. 

Euphues, Lyly's, 4, 12, 131. 

Euphues' Shadow, Lodge's, 28. 

Faery Queen, Spenser's, 193. 

Falkland, Earl of, 303, 321, 326. 

Feltham, Owen, 115, 121. 

Ferrar, John, 163. 

Ferrar, Nicholas, 163, 164, 165, 173, 

Fig for Momus, Lodge's, 34, 35. 

Fletcher, John, 130. 

Fool's Bolt is soon Shot, A, Row- 
lands', 96. 

Forbonius and Prisceria, Lodge's, 
II, 12. 

Fordd Marriage, The, Behn's, 303. 



Index 



347 



Ford, John, 66, 177, 178. 
Fosse, Antoine de la, 341. 
Fowler, Katherine. See Philips, 

Mrs. K. 
Fraunce, Abraham, 4. 
Friendship in Fashion ^ Otway's, 

319-20. 

Games, The Cotswold, 103-124. 

See Annalia Duhrensia. 
Gautier, Th^ophile, 127. 
Gidding, Little, 163-65. 
Gildon, Charles, 261, 262. 
Glaucus and Scilla, See Scilla's 

Meta morphosis, 
Gondibert, Davenant's, 210. 
Gongora, 173. 

Good News and Bad News^ Row- 
lands', 97-98. 
Gosson, Rev. Stephen, 6, 7, 9, 21. 
Greene, Robert, 4, 10, 11, 13, 19, 

22, 27-30, 47, 82, 86. 
Greene's Ghost Haunting Coney- 

catchers t Rowlands', 87. 
Griffin, Robert, no, in. 
Grosart, Rev. A. B., 113, 158, 166, 

177, 186, 192. 
Guardian, The, Cowley's, 203-4. 
Guise, The, Webster's, 53. 
Guyt Earlof Warwick, The Famous 

History of, Rowlands', 92, 
Gwynn, Mrs. Eleanor, 307, 309. 

Habington, William, 117, 173,207. 
Hall, Bishop Joseph, 34. 
Harrison, tragic story of William, 

122. 
Harvey, Gabriel, 21. 
Harvey, William, 210. 
Hekatompathia, Watson's, 4, 16. 
Hell's Broke Loose, Rowlands', 89. 
Henslowe, 30. 
Herbert, George, 168, 175. 
Heroick Friendship, Otway's, 337- 

340. 



Herrick, Robert, in, 125-56, 168 ; 
birth, 127 ; youth, 128 ; Jonson's 
influence, 129 ; at Cambridge, 130 ; 
life in Devon, 131, 135-36 ; person 
and style, 132-34 ; his Julia, 137 ; 
sources of inspiration, 152-54, 
last years, 155, 156. 

Herries, William, 161. 

Hesperides, 127, 131, i37-47> ^S^. 

Hey wood, John, 104. 

Heywood, Thomas, 41, 115, 120. 

Higgins, Thomas, 225. 

Hind and the Panther, The, Dry- 
den's, 295. 

History of the Triumvirate, Otway's, 
336. 

Horace, Orinda's, 254. 

Hudibras, 251. 

Humour* s Looking-G lass, Rowlands' , 
92. 

Huntley, R. W., 103. 

Idea, Drayton's, 35. 
Ingleby, Dr. C. M., 30. 

Johnson, Charles, 202. 

Jonson, Ben, 50, 52, 115, 116, 128- 

30, 139, 146, 152, 197, 267, 

301. 
Josephus, 40. 

Keats, John, 230, 238. 
Killigrew, Sir Thomas, 306. 
Knave of Clubs, Rowlands', 94. 
Knave of Hearts, Rowlands', 95. 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 
97. 

Lamb, Charles, 55, 69, 717. 
Lansdowne, George, Lord, 273. 
Lany, Dr. Benjamin, 160, 161. 
Lawes, Henry, 250. 
Laxton, Sir William, 2. 
Lee, Nat, 294, 305, 308, 323, 335, 
340. 



348 



Index 



Letterbook of Sir G. Etheredge, 260, 
285-98. 

Letting of Humour s Blood in the 
Head Vein, Rowlands', 84, 85, 89. 

Life and Death of William Long- 
beard, Lodge's, 32. 

Life of Robert the Devil, Lodge's, 22. 

Lodge, Anne, Lady, Epitaph of, 6. 

Lodge, Thomas, 1-46, 85 ; parent- 
age, 2 ; at Merchant. Taylors' 
School, 3 ; at Oxford, 4-5 ; at- 
tacks Gosson, 6-9; marriages, 9, 
37 ; religion, 12, 13, 23, 37, 38, 44; 
influence on Shakespeare, 14, 15 ; 
adventures, 17, 24-26 ; satire, 34 ; 
at Leyton, 37-44; adopts medi- 
cine, 40 ; in Low Countries, 43 ; 
death, 44 ; style, 44-46. 

Look to It, or ril Stab You, Row- 
lands', 89. 

Looking-Glass for Lo7idon and Eng- 
land, Lodge's, 29-31. 

Lope de Vega, 61. 

Lovers Melancholy, The, Ford's, 
177. 

Loves Gj-aduate, Webster's, 76, 79. 

Love's Riddle, Cowley's, 200. 

Lowell's Commemoration Ode, 216, 

343. 
Lower, Sir William, 264, 266. 
Lyly, John, 4, 13, 28, 45, 82. 

Macflecknoe, Dry den's, 295. 
Maid's Tragedy, 130. 
Mamillia, Greene's, 11. 
Man of Mode, The, Etheredge's, 

277-83, 288. 
Margarite of America, Lodge's, 26, 

36, 39, 40. 
Marini's Strage degli hinocenti, 

173. 
Marmion, Shackerley, 115, 121. 
Marlowe, Christopher, 27, 29-31, 

47. 50. 53. 65. 
Martial's Epigrams, 138, 139, 152. 



Martin Mark-all, Rowlands', 95. 
Masque of Queens, Jonson's, 129. 
Mayne, Jasper, 264, 317. 
Meade, Robert, 194. 
Melancholy Knight, Rowlands', 

96, 97. 
Menaphon, Greene's, 19, 47. 
Mennis, Sir John, 115. 
Merchant Taylors' School, 3. 
Merry Meeting, A, Rowlands', 84. 
Milton, John, 197, 202, 214. 
Mirror for Magistrates, 226. 
Miscellanies, Cowley's, 202-10. 
Mistress, The, Cowley's, 203, 206, 

207, 214. 
Moliere, 267, 297, 315. 
More, Dr. Henry, 208. 
Mulgrave, John, Earl of, 293, 

316. 
Munday, Anthony, 54. 

Nash, Thomas, 29, 30, 86. 
Naufragium Joculare, Cowley's 

202. 
Night Raven, The, Rowlands', 97. 
Noble Nmnbers, Herrick's, 133-36, 

147-50- 

Oberon, Jonson's, 129. 

Odes of Anacreon^ Cowley's, 214. 

Ogilby, John, 247, 249, 250. 

Oldys, William, 260-62, 276, 298. 

Orinda. See Philips. 

Orinda to Poliarchus, Letter from, 

242. 
Orphan, The, Otway's, 322-26, 333, 

341. 

Orrery, Roger, Earl of, 224, 246-48, 
250. 

Otway, Thomas, 299-342 ; parent- 
age, 301, 302; education, 303; 
tries stage, 303 ; in London, 305 ; 
attachment to Mrs. Barry, 309,310, 
334 ; success, 314 ; quarrels with 
Dryden, 315 ; enlists, 317 ; com- 



Index 



349 



edies, 318 ; adversity, 320, 328 ; 
sums paid for his plays, 333; 
ruin, 335; death, 336; person, 
340 ; influence of French school, 
340, 341. 

Pallotta, Cardinal J. B., 183, 184, 
186. 

Parkes, W., 99. 

Peele, George, 413. 

Philips, Mrs. Katherine, "the 
matchless Orinda," 223, 229-58 ; 
birth, 230; marriage, 231; life at 
Cardigan, 240 ; in London, 241 ; 
letters, 242-44, 304 ; in Ireland, 
245-49 ; pirated, 253 ; death, 
254. 

Phil lis. Lodge's, 32. 

Philosophical Poe^ns, More's, 208. 

Phosnix Nest^ The, 32. 

Pindarique Odes, Cowley's, 214, 
216. 

Plague, Treatise of the, Lodge's, 40. 

Poetical Blossoms, Cowley's, 194, 
198, 200. 

Poets Complaint of his Muse, The, 
Otway's, 327. 

Pompey, Waller's, 249, 250. 

Poor Man s Talent, Lodge's, 43, 44. 

Pope, Alexander, 182, 216. 

Porter, Endymion, 107. 

Princess of Cleve, The^ Lee's, 294. 

Prolusiones of Strada, 176. 

Promos and Cassandra^ Whet- 
stone's, II. 

Prosopopeia, Lodge's, 38. 

Prynne, William, 203, 210. 

Psyche, Joseph Beaumont's, 166, 

Py ramus and Thishe, Cowley's, 193, 
195. 

Racine, 315. 

Randolph, Thomas, 115, 117-20, 

198, 200, 201. 
Return from Parnassus, 41. 



Rich, Barnaby, 8. 
Rival Ladies, The, Dryden's, 265, 
Robinson, Rev. Charles J. , 3. 
Robinson, Clement, 13. 
Rochester, Wilmot, Earl of, 91, 283, 

296, 307, 316, 320, 322. 
Rosalynde, Lodge's, 17-23, 31, 33, 

39- 

Roscommon, Wentworth, Earl of, 
247, 248, 250. 

Rowlands, Samuel, 81-10S; his call- 
ing, 88, 89. 

Rowley, William, 49, 74, 76. 

Sailor s Calendar, Lodge's, 23. 
Saint- Amant, French poet, 144, 207. 
St. John of the Cross, 169. 
Sansovino, 185. 

School of Abuse, The, Gosson's, 6, 7. 
Scillds Metamorphosis, Lodge's, 

i3» 14. 
Sedley, Sir Charles, 263, 270, 278, 

284, 294, 296. 
Selden, John, 130. 
Seneca, 43. 

Separatists ; A Satire against, 209. 
Settle, Elkanah, 314, 315. 
Shadwell, Thomas, 277, 296, 313, 

317. 
Shakespeare, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 34, 

104, no, 130, 146, 297, 323, 326, 
She Gallants, Lansdowne's, 273. 
She Would if She Could, Ether- 
edge's, 262, 270-75, 277. 
Shorthouse, Mr. J. H. , 173, 178 ; 

John Inglesant, 158, 184. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 33 ; Apology for 

Poetry, 7. 
Siege of Rhodes, The, Davenant's, 

265. 
Six London Gossips, Rowlands', 92, 

94. 
Soldier' s Fortune, The, Otway's, 320, 

335- 
Spanish Masquerado, Greene's, 22. 



350 



Index 



Spe, Friedrich, 171, 172. 
Spenser, Edmund, 21, 144. 
Spiders Web, The, Lodge's, 23. 
Sprat, Bishop, 215, 222, 225. 
Spring- Rice, Mr. S. E., 79. 
Stanley, Thomas, 214. 
Steps to the Temple, Crashaw's, 

168. 
Strada, Famianus, 176. 
Suckling, Sir John, 121, 125. 
Swinburne, Mr. Algernon C, xii., 

178, 180. 

Tamhurlaine the Great, Marlowe's. 

30. 
Tartuffe, 271, 276. 
Tate, Nahum, 223. 
Taylor, Jeremy, 232, 240, 245. 
Taylor, John, the water-poet, 99. 
Temple, The, Herbert's, 168. 
Terrible Battle between Time and 

Death, Rowlands', 90. 
Theatre of Divine Recreation, A, 

Rowlands', 89. 
* Tis Merry when Gossips Meet, Row- 

lands', 85-87, loi. 
Titus and Berenice, Otway's, 315. 
Tourneur, Cyril, 66. 
Trutz-Nachtigal, Spe's, 172. 
Tuke, Samuel, 251. 



Two Harpies ^ The^ Webster's, 53. 
Tyrell, James, 247. 

Vandyke, Sir Anthony, 203. 
Vaughan, Henry, the Silurist, 231. 
Venice Preserved, Otway's, 323, 

328, 333. 
Venus and Adonis, 14. 
Voltaire, 341, 342. 

Walbancke, Mat., 115. 

Waller, Edmund, 151, 221, 227, 251, 

272, 326. 
Watson, Thomas, 4, 13, 16, 21, 27, 

33. 41. 
Webster, John, 47-80. 
Whetstone, George, 11. 
White Devil, The, Webster's, 51. 

54-59. 

Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, Row- 
lands', 94. 

Windsor Castle, Otway's, 335. 

Winstanley's Lives of the Poets, 155. 

Wifs Misery and the World! s Mad- 
ness, Lodge's, 37, 38. 

Wood, Anthony k, 2, 3, 40, 106, 
121, 122. 

Wootton, Sir Henry, 203. 

Wordsworth, William, 14, 141, 226. 

Wycherley, William, 278, 295, 317. 



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